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STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 



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STUDIES AND 

APPRECIATIONS 



BY 

LEWIS E. GATES 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1900 

All rights reserved 



5033' 



L.tbr»«ry of Cunt.f^i'ss 

SEP 22 1900 

S£C<'Nt' COPY. 

0«*»vwe(< to 

OhOtri DIVISION, 
OCr 13 1900 






COPTBIOHT, 1900, 

bt the macmillan company. 



NortoooU Vre88 

J. S. Cushiug Jk Co. — Berwiclc k 
Norwood, Mail., U. S. ▲. 



CONTENTS 



; f'/ 



The Romantic Movement . . 
The Return to Conventional Life . 
Tennyson's Relation to Common Life 
Nature in Tennyson's Poetry 
Hawthorne .... 
Edgar Allan Poe . 
Charlotte Bronte 
Three Lyrical Modes . 
Taine's Influence as a Critic 
Impressionism and Appreciation 



1 

27 

60 

77 

92 

110 

129 

171 

192 

205 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

■ The era of modern life, in England as in France, 
dates from 1789. The nineteenth century began 
in the year in which the shock of the French 
Eevolution went crisping over the nerves of the 
nations of Europe, stirred all men to novel thoughts 
and new moods, and startled them into fresh ways 
of envisaging life. If, however, the student of 
English literature wants a specifically literary 
and a national date for the beginning of the new 
era, the year 1800 offers itself as curiously apt; 
in that year appeared Wordsworth's Preface to the 
Lyrical Ballads, which as truly though not so con- 
sciously as Hugo's f*reface to Cromwell nearly 
thirty years later, was the manifesto of a revo- 
lutionary movement. Wrong-headed as was Words- 
worth's declaration that the Muse ought to speak 
with the burr of Cumberland peasants, and absurd 
as was the tangle of inconsistencies into which his 
acceptance of metre and his rejection of all other 
differences between prose and poetry betrayed 
him, yet even these parts of his Preface, because 
of their plea for veraciousness in poetry and their 
insistence on poetry as the natural idiom for deep 



2 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

feeling, were essentially modern and were on the 
whole salutary in their influence; and as for the 
rest of the Preface, it stated doctrine after doc- 
trine about the nature of poetry and the relations 
of poetry to life that for a quarter of a century 
the new age went on working out and illustrat- 
ing, often, of course, in the persons of poets who 
were quite unaware of Wordsworth's programme. 
Poetry was no longer to be thought of as an in- 
genious stringing together of moral epigrams by 
clever craftsmen; it was to be the "spontaneous 
overflow of powerful feelings.'' The old doctrine 
that a poem gets its worth from the dignity of its 
subject was condemned; the poet's moods were to 
be the measure of all things; any subject from a 
primrose or a Cumberland beggar to man's longing 
for immortality might furnish forth the substance 
for a poem, providing it stirred the poet's heart 
sincerely and deeply. Above all, poetry was not 
to be regarded as a mere graceful pastime ; it was 
to be reverenced as the one mode of utterance 
for the most intimate truths about man and nature 
that the human spirit can reach; it was to be ex- 
alted as " the first and last of all knowledge . . . 
immortal as the heart of man." 

One could hardly ask for a better account of the 
new spirit in literature — of the spirit that was 
to inform the best poetry and prose during the 
next twenty-five years — than Wordsworth's Pre- 
face offers. It specifies or suggests nearly all 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 3 

the aspects of the complete renovation of litera- 
ture which the new age was to accomplish, and 
nearly all the varieties of new spiritual experience 
which the men of the new dispensation were to 
win and interpret. In one of his letters, Keats 
sums up life as a soul-making process. " Call the 
world if you please," he says, "'The Vale of Soul- 
Making. ' " This may well stand as the legend 
of the Komanticists. They were the rediscoverers 
of the soul 5 or, if one prefers the word that M. 
Pellissier uses in describing the similar movement 
in France, they were reasserters of the primacy of 
the spirit. Under this formula may be brought 
whatever is most characteristic alike in the poetry 
of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, 
and Keats, and. in the prose of Hazlitt, Lamb, 
Leigh Hunt, and De Quincey. 

To speak of Scott's poems and romances as hav- 
ing spiritual quality may seem fantastic. Jenny 
Lind used to say querulously of Scott that he did 
no good to her soulj and Peacock's favourite jeer 
at the Wizard of the North was that he was merely 
a gigantic master of pantomime and harlequinade, 
no end clever in engineering showy spectacles and 
in decking out mock pageants in tinsel and stage- 
finery, but a bungler in all that concerns the mind 
and the heart. Yet 'despite such jeers as these, it 
may safely be asserted that the influence of Scott's 
writings was in large measure a spiritual influence. 
Scott quickened and fostered in the race a new 



4 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

spiritual sense — the sense for its historical pastj 
he deepened and widened the national conscious- 
ness and made it include not merely its own pass- 
ing phases, but also the earlier stages of thought 
and of feeling, of custom, of belief, and of worship 
through which in the Middle Ages it had worked 
its way. His Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert and 
Richard Coeur de Lion and Quentin Durward may 
not have been either very minutely or very accu- 
rately realized ; yet their hopes and their longings 
and their hates and their struggles, their passions 
of pursuit and repulsion were with some degree of 
faithfulness captured and portrayed and were thus 
brought within the sympathetic appreciation of the 
men of the early nineteenth century ; and the vari- 
ous social forces of feudalism — these, too, with 
their rhythms of aspiration and achievement, were 
imaginatively reproduced and a vital sense of them 
was conveyed into the minds and the hearts of the 
new generation. This meant the enrichment and 
the deepening of consciousness, the infusion into 
it of new colour, new variety, new elements of feel- 
ing, new sources of delight. The eighteenth-cen- 
tury consciousness had been but a shallow affair. 
It had contented itself in its typical state with such 
ideas and feelings as a man of the world might need 
at an assembly so as to chatter about the foibles or 
follies of the town, or in a council-chamber for the 
analysis of court intrigue or political manoeu- 
vring, or with such conceptions as at the utmost an 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 5 

abstract thinker might in his closet discover and 
tabulate, — reasoning on prosaic experience with 
the help of mathematics and logic. The good folk 
of the eighteenth century were, above all, people 
of intellect who prided themselves on their ration- 
ality, who despised the insensate enthusiasm and 
the fatuous superstitions that the Middle Ages had 
revelled in, and who did their best to forget the 
Gothic absurdities of those Don-Quixote-like ances- 
tors of theirs whose imaginations, as Swift put 
it, were perpetually astride on their reasons. The 
eighteenth century boasted of being an age of quite 
novel refinement and enlightenment: it purged 
itself of old prejudices, old beliefs, old passions ; it 
concentrated itself on common-sense tasks both in 
practical life and in the life of the intellect; it 
scorned in actual life whatever could not be made 
to tally with its own somewhat ironical social in- 
stincts and in intellectual life whatever defied the 
rule of three or the sorites and the syllogism. 
Hence the beautiful clearness and also the impov- 
erished simplicity of the experience of this century 
and of its literature. Against the shallowness of 
this purely intellectual and conventional life a 
mighty reaction began in the last half of the cen- 
tury, and Scott^s work was one phase of the cul- 
mination of this reaction. Scott himself, it is true, 
had no new insight into what are technically called 
spiritual problems. He was no transcendentalist or 
"ideal-blind" enthusiast; he offered nothing either 



6 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

in his poems or in his romances that could directly 
help his readers into a surer relation toward the 
mysterious powers of the spiritual world. But his 
influence tended, with a decisiveness that we now 
find it hard to realize, to break down the bounds 
of the old-time, narrow, conventional, and purely 
intellectual world in which the witty men of the 
eighteenth century had lived and had tried to be- 
lieve they were thriving. He touched the men of 
his day into a vital sense of kinship with the men 
of the Middle Ages — with the men of those " ages 
of faith " wherein life was lived passionately and 
imaginatively under haunted heavens. And so he 
gave to his readers both a new belief in their 
hearts and imaginations and a great mass of new 
feelings and new sympathies. He made a poten- 
tial gift to each of his readers of an individual past 
of a thousand years of intense living. 

Scott's vogue as a poet yielded to that of Byron, 
and in Byron's verse the revolt against the com- 
monplace, that in Scott had been only implicit, 
became fiercely aggressive. In the interests of 
individual freedom Byron quarrelled with life in a 
twofold way; he assailed conventional prejudice 
that held in check free play of feeling and action, 
and that tried to compel every respectable person 
to form himself on an eighteenth-century tradi- 
tional pattern of rational correctness ; and he went 
still farther and arraigned the whole scheme of the 
universe for not conspiring to minister obediently 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 7 

to the needs of his craving egoism. If Scott had 
been chiefly decorative, Byron was above all things 
ethical, and his enormous popularity was due to the 
audacious moral challenge of his verse. He had 
the declamatory eloquence of the hustings which an 
English public readily understands; and as he ha- 
rangued in somewhat garish rhetoric on " custom's 
falsest scale," and on "the fire and motion of the 
soul," described ornately the splendid carnal orgies 
of his Oriental heroes, and above all hinted darkly 
at his own mischances and misdeeds and hymned 
in triumphant rhythms his own despair, all Eng- 
land, from old maiden ladies who read and shrieked 
and read again, to the dandies and macaronis at the 
clubs, felt that the spirit of the hour had spoken 
and had uttered what every one was burning to 
listen to. Here, at last, was that passion the false 
semblance of which they had cheated themselves 
with in Monk Lewis and Kotzebue ; passion as real 
and fierce as anything of which the Middle Ages 
could boast, yet mightily modern and with a dis- 
tinguished pessimistic note that was new in this 
Western world. Open neckcloths became the only 
wear. People of fashion dared to look beyond the 
drawing-room and the coffee-house and the club and 
to realize that they were perhaps something more 
than exquisitely fashioned social automata. Byron 
gave aristocratic sanction to the rebel heart. 

Intense, passionate personal experience of all 
kinds — this was Byron's ideal. The experience 



8 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

was to be won for the most part through action; 
Byron was not subtle and did not anticipate the 
modern dilettante's refined methods of savouring 
life at second hand and enriching one's spirit 
imaginatively and by proxy. Life meant to him the 
play of a fiercely egoistic will in the search for self- 
realization. Through adventure, through travel, 
through intrigue, through love, the craving of the 
individual for overwhelmingly vivid emotion was 
perpetually to be gratified. In eighteenth-century 
literature, only emotions had been expressed and 
sanctioned such as men could share in common, — 
such as made for the safety of a conventionally 
wrought social organism. In Byron the individual 
came to his rights with a vengeance, and indeed 
came to more than his rights. Byron once for all 
opened a career for talent in the matter of emotion ; 
every man was to feel as richly and intensely as the 
gods had given him power to feel. The needs of 
his own heart, not the needs of the social organism, 
were to be the test of the fitness of his feeling. 
"Custom's scale" was false; and conventional 
society was through and through made what it was 
by misleading traditions and prescriptions. From 
all these the individual should turn away and 
should turn toward Nature. Individual passion 
was working out for itself a new destiny ; and con- 
ventional society had to come in for much random 
abuse as well as for quite justifiable criticism and 
invective. 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 9 

What "Wordsworth did for the spiritual regenera- 
tion of the century has become, of course, a very 
familiar story. In point of fact, however, Words- 
worth's influence made itself felt at the start with 
surprising slowness. He had been publishing his 
earliest poems while Byron was still trundling hoop 
and quarrelling with his nurse, and the first edition 
of the Lyrical Ballads had appeared when Byron 
was only ten years old. Yet not till 1829 — so 
Lord Houghton notes — did Wordsworth — five 
years after Byron's death — begin to supplant the 
poet of Childe Harold and the Giaour in the favour 
of University youth. Wordsworth was essentially 
the most conservative of the Romanticists ; and for 
that reason his vogue came more slowly, and for 
that reason, too, his influence has been farther- 
reaching and more permanent. Like all the 
Romanticists Wordsworth was anti-conventional; 
but, unlike so many of them, he was never for a 
moment essentially anti-social. 

Wordsworth's anti-conventionalism showed itself 
in many ways and forms. He contemned "the 
world " with a spiritual scorn that was in its own 
fashion as withering as Byron's cynical satire in 
Don Juan. His hatred of conventional life utters 
itself alike in his poetry and in his correspondence. 
In Thitern Abbey he bewails the unloveliness of 
ordinary human intercourse and grieves over the 
"rash judgments," "the sneers of selfish men," the 
" greetings where no kindness is, " which make up 



10 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

SO large a part of it. In one of his letters he 
describes the round of idleness and frivolity in 
which the frequenter of routs and assemblies 
spends his time, and asserts that the man who 
leads such an existence can have no insight into 
poetry. Wordsworth loathed the artificial life of 
the town and he never would have consented to 
accept, as M. Sully-Prudhomme in La Justice 
accepts, the modern city as being the treasure- 
house and the symbol of the best that the human 
race has wrought out for itself. At times, it almost 
seems as if Wordsworth would have liked to have 
all men and women take to the woods. Moreover, 
Wordsworth's romantic anti-conventionalism shows 
itself not only in his attacks on the world, but in 
the positive parts of his moral doctrine. He was 
bent on regenerating the individual human being, 
on transforming him in many ways, on waking in 
him manifold new instincts, new feelings, new 
passions, and new aspirations, on making him over 
almost as radically, so it sometimes seems, as even 
Byron wished. 

Yet despite all his hatred of old artificial con- 
ventions and despite all his desire to bring new 
tracts of experience within reach of the individual, 
Wordsworth was not for a moment anti-social. In 
all his tinkering with the human type, he regarded 
the complex of moral affections that had been tra- 
ditionally approved in English life as sacrosanct. 
The love of husband for wife, and of parents for 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 11 

children, all the domestic sanctities, the veneration 
of the Christian for the Church, and the allegiance 
of the citizen to the state, and of the common man 
to all the squirearchical powers above him — these 
Wordsworth reverenced as the essential elements 
of individual worth; he had no Shelleyan mission 
to manufacture a totally new brand of human 
nature, no cynical Byronic rage for destruction for 
its own delightful sake. 

Wherein then consisted Wordsworth's regenerat- 
ing influence, — the indubitable renovation of the 
spirit that his poetry wrought and was meant to 
effect? This influence came in a twofold way. 
The old affections and instincts received through 
Wordsworth's imaginative treatment of them a 
special new virtue; and they were also supple- 
mented and reenforced by new masses of delicate 
and tender and ennobling emotion that Words- 
worth was the first to experience, to express with 
imaginative power, and to infect others with. 

Through his transcendentalism Wordsworth gave 
a new meaning not simply to Physical Nature but 
to Human Nature as well. Securely convinced as 
he was of the existence of an Infinite Spiritual 
Power that revealed itself in the conscience of man 
and also ministered to him through the splendour 
and beauty of Nature, — embracing the individual 
on all sides with caressing and sustaining sym- 
bolism, — Wordsworth believed, further, that the 
humblest of human creatures, by yielding himself 



12 THE KOMANTIC MOVEMENT 

obediently to the influence of this Power and ful- 
fill ng its mandates, could reach true dignity and 
grandeur. Every one knows Wordsworth's trans- 
figured Leech-gatherer. He and his transfiguration 
are examples of the kind of redemption that 
Wordsworth sought to work throughout the range 
of common life. He aimed to simplify and inten- 
sify life, — to emphasize the primal affections and 
instincts and duties, to give them new grace and 
glory by a spiritual sanction, and to confer on the 
most ordinary offices of life a certain mystical 
beauty through portraying them as watched by 
Nature with a kind of conspiring approval. 

But Wordsworth did not simply work transform- 
ingly upon the primal elements of human nature; 
he gave to his fellows what was almost a new spir- 
itual sense; he waked in them a new, delicate 
instinct for beauty; he stirred in them new forms 
of imaginative sympathy. Often he gets the credit 
of having invented Nature ; and in very truth the 
peculiar modern feeling that nature and man are 
close of kin and speak a common tongue first comes 
into English poetry through Wordsworth. His 
transcendentalism changed nature into a living 
spiritual presence, thrillingly responsive to man's 
spiritual moods and needs. The brazen heavens 
that had weighed over the eighteenth century 
became " the soft blue sky " that " melts into the 
heart." The "horrid rocks'' that had daunted the 
men of the eighteenth century, or that had at most 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 13 

stirred them to rhetorical admiration as before 
cleverly wrought stage-scenery, became the haunted 
abode of "the sleep that is among the lonely hills." 
Everywhere in nature Wordsworth found spirit 
waiting for recognition — gracious meanings ex- 
quisitely involved in the meshes of beautiful 
colours and sounds, in the flight of the lark, in 
the dancing of daffodils, in the trumpets of the 
cataract; man's own spirit, in sublimated form, 
divinely smiling out from behind the apparently 
fortuitous play of the atoms. Everywhere he dis^ 
covered, as Shelley said of him half -mockingly, " a 
soul in sense." And this fine spiritual irritability 
in the presence of nature was a permanent gift of 
his to the English temperament. Many later poets 
have felt and interpreted the symbolic challenge 
of nature more subtly, but none more nobly and 
pervasively. 

And so one might go through the other Romantic 
poets and trace out by analysis the aesthetic and 
ethical winnings they garnered, the new kinds of 
spiritual experience and the new modes of bliss and 
of woe that they explored and made possible. Keats 
is perhaps the least easily brought under the 
Eomantic formula; yet indubitably he belongs 
there, despite the common talk about his Hellen- 
ism. There was never a greater master of "natural 
magic " than the poet of La Belle Dame sans Merci. 
"A wild and harmonized tune" it was that his 
"spirit," as he himself says of Endymion, "struck 



14 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

from all the beautiful." The beauty that he 
created is an iridescent beauty, pulsingly indis- 
tinct in its outlines, shimmering with elusive sug- 
gestions, not the firm, plastic beauty of Pagan art. 
In Keats the senses, so pitifully neglected by the 
eighteenth century, which looked, as Dr. Johnson 
said, "for large appearances" and rarely wrote 
with the eye on the object, came once more into 
luxurious possession of the world. If Wordsworth 
found a soul in sense, Keats found senses in the 
soul. More nearly, perhaps, than any other poet 
except Dante Gabriel Eossetti he exorcised the 
Demon of the Abstract from the world of poetry. 
He could not even measure empty distance or blank 
time without striking into life images of beauty. 

Moreover, in Keats's poetry the division between 
the Romantic world of dreams and the actual 
world of everyday fact is marked even more 
clearly than it is in other Eomantic poetry of the 
time. Wordsworth and Byron, for example, both 
rebelled against the tyranny of the actual; but 
their awareness of the life they protested against 
shows itself through the intensity or the fierceness 
of their criticisms upon it. Keats for the most 
part serenely disregards conventional life and all 
its concerns and customs. There are, to be sure, in 
Endymion two passages where he fantastically 
breaks into outspoken scorn of the base interests 
and false standards that rule in the practical world. 
At the opening of Book iii., he describes the gro- 



THE ROMAN'TIC MOVEMENT 15 

tesque enthusiasm with which worldings run after 
their "tip-top nothings" and celebrate their mis- 
taken triumphs. And at the beginning of Book ii., 
he cries out against History because of its black 
devotion to the details of politics and war. His- 
tory is but a "swart planet in the universe of 
deeds." For the rest, Keats hardly honours con- 
ventional life even so far as explicitly to dislike it. 
His own dream of beauty — this it is that monopo- 
lizes him. His hero, Endymion, is in one place 
portrayed as standing "upon a misty, jutting head 
of land " and gazing sadly into the empyrean, long- 
ing for " the soft shadow of his thrice-seen love " ; 
only with this dream of beauty will he be content; 
he can find " nought earthly worth his compassing." 
Endymion's figure and mood symbolize well 
Keats's own aloofness from life and his devotion 
to the Dream. Not that he likes to play quaint 
tricks with his imagination and to indulge in such 
wildly fantastic visions as Shelley permits him- 
self in his Witch of Atlas. Keats is always close to 
the comfort-giving earth and to its bowers of quiet. 
But within the compass of the earth, he surely and 
delicately misses all that has not poetic value, — all 
that has no charm for the senses, the heart, and 
the imagination. And therefore he is the most 
poetical of poets: the least troubled by what the 
world and its objects and scenes mean to the prac- 
tical man, the least worried by the blur of vulgar 
associations and suggestions in which all material 



16 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

things tend to be involved by the use and wont of 
daily life. Even the oyster takes on imaginative 
beauty for Keats, who dares to place it at the very 
climax of his praise of the ministering splendour 
of the moon : — 

"Thou art a relief 
To the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps 
Within its pearly house." 

And indeed this mood of kindled sensitiveness to 
the purely imaginative charm of the world becomes 
for Keats the typical mood of the blessed life, and 
he exalts into a religion the fervent pursuit of this 
mood and of the sensations and images that awake 
it. Endymion querying with himself "Wherein 
lies happiness," answers : — 

" In that which becks 
Our ready minds to fellowship divine, 
A fellowship with essence ; till we shine, 
Full alchemized, and free of space. Behold 
The clear religion of heaven ! *' 

The votary of this religion, so Endymion murmurs 
to himself, is able to elude the insistently prosaic 
surface of things and to find the whole earth tin- 
glingly suggestive of beauty and of nothing but 
beauty : — 

"... Old songs waken from enclouded tombs ; 
Old ditties sigh above their father's grave ; 
Ghosts of melodious prophesyings rave 
Bound every spot where trod Apollo's foot ; 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 17 

Bronze clarions awake and faintly bruit, 
Where long ago a giant battle was ; 
And from the turf a lullaby doth pass 
In every place where infant Orpheus slept." 

War and political intrigue and all tliat has hap- 
pened or happens on the crust of the earth become 
at last the stuff that dreams are made of, — serve 
simply to wake new vibrations in the beauty -lover's 
temperament. The two sorts of bliss, to be sure, 
that Keats most exalts are feelings that link the 
individual to others; among passionate moods, 
those that have " the chief intensity " are " friend- 
ship and love." Yet even these passionate moods 
as Keats represents them really have their rewards 
in themselves ; they are moods ri " ardent listless- 
ness " that have no issue in the world of conven- 
tional routine. Keats's heroes never do aught save 
wander ecstatically over the surface of the earth 
and through the depths of the sea, or make love in 
a lady's chamber. Even Hyperion's most super- 
lative act is a magnificently picturesque entrance 
into his palace. One has but to compare Keats 's 
heroes with Landor's — Endymion with Gebir — and 
Keats's moods with Landor's to see how subjective 
Keats is, how the world becomes for him merely a 
great forcing-house for passion and rich entangle- 
ments of feeling, how entirely his earth and his 
moods and his aspirations are different from those 
that enter into the conventional drama of practical 
life, and how little they can receive the sanction 



18 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

of the common sense. Through all these qualities 
of his genius, through his remoteness from ordi- 
nary life and his exquisite eccentricity, Keats 
reveals himself as essentially Eomantic. 

When we turn from poetry to prose we find that 
the formula that has been suggested as summing 
up the Romantic movement still holds true. In 
its most characteristic forms the prose, like the 
poetry of this period is used for the enrichment of 
the inner life of the individual rather than for the 
closer knitting of the bonds that bind men together 
in conventional life. Prose like poetry works for 
the spiritualization of humanity rather than for its 
organization. In the pursuit of this somewhat un- 
prosaic end, prose takes on many of the character- 
istics of poetry and strives in manifold ways to win 
new expressiveness. It gives over its monopoliz- 
ing interest in abstract ideas and generalizations, 
becomes aware of the surface of life, and tries to 
portray the splendour and the magnificence of the 
outside world as this world beats against thrilling 
senses. It gains often an intensely personal note, 
and a tone and a rhythm that are almost lyrical. 
Its surface glows with a figurative richness and 
with a warmth and a colour that to Swift or to 
Dr. Johnson would have seemed indecorous and 
even grotesque. The Preface of the Lyrical Bal- 
lads, as has already been noted, claimed for the 
poetic interpretation of life superiority over the 
prose interpretation. This claim, the great prose- 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 19 

writers of the period implicitly or explicitly 
granted. And they therefore were more or less 
consciously drawn to bring prose, their own mode of 
expression, as close as they might to the idiom of 
the gods. De Quincey's so-called "impassioned 
prose" works out and expresses Eomantic ideals 
with an art that is deliberate and elaborate. Lamb, 
Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt all accomplish, in one way 
or another, that peculiar redemption of the com- 
monplace, in terms of intense personal feeling, in 
which the essence of Eomantic art consists. 

Characteristic of all these artists is the return for 
models of excellence to writers earlier than the age 
of Queen Anne, often to writers of the Elizabethan 
period. De Quincey's sarcastic strictures on the 
incompetent literalness of Swift's prose style have 
become traditional instances of Eomantic prejudice; 
the savage Dean is challenged to write a description 
of the pageantry of Belshazzar's feast, and because 
of his alleged prosy inability, he is scorned as a 
mere base servitor in the train of art. Coleridge's 
devotion to Jeremy Taylor and to the splendid elo- 
quence of even earlier divines passed into a by- 
word. Lamb's first important literary venture was 
John Woodvil, a tragedy in the Elizabethan manner; 
and his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808) 
contained delicately impressionistic criticism of 
the passion and power of the Elizabethan drama — 
criticism that sent readers by scores to the long- 
neglected works of Marlowe, Webster, and Ford. 



20 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

The fantastically archaic beauty of Lamb's own 
prose style would show how deeply he had been 
subdued to the spell of sixteenth- and seventeenth- 
century prose, even were his essays not so continu- 
ally outspoken as they are in their devotion to 
Isaak Walton, to Fuller, and to Burton. 

Nor is the substance that enters into the prose of 
Lamb, De Quincey, and Hazlitt less Romantic in 
quality than their style. Lamb's whim converts 
the commonest object it plays over into something 
new and delicately individual, fashioned cunningly 
out of Lamb's moods and fancies and imaginative 
associations. Was there 'ever .a quainter change 
than that which the London chimney-sweep goes 
through in the pages of Lamb's essay? He comes 
out all cobwebbed over with gossamer beauty, — 
a sort of Prince from the Land of Droll Dreaming, 
a sublimated little symbol of thoughts and feel- 
ings that in actual life are leagues out of his ken. 
To assure one's self of the Romantic note in Lamb, 
one need but compare an essay of this sort with 
Addison's or Steele's essays. Lamb is subjec- 
tive, moody, imaginative, fantastic, always trem- 
ulously aware of the mystery that lurks behind 
the commonplace, though rarely expressing this 
directly. 

Nor, indeed, is Hazlitt's Romanticism any less 
unmistakable. His essays are full of querulous 
protest against the checks and scorns to which 
conventional life subjects the special soul; full 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 21 

of pathetic appeals to Nature for redress, and of 
Kousseau-like passionate portrayal of natural 
scenery; often poignant in their utterance of per- 
sonal sorrow and grieving; often lyrical in their 
tone and movement; at times, audacious in their 
imagery. 

As for De Quincey, almost the whole range of 
Komantic effect is to be found in his impassioned 
prose; he is the greatest and the most represen- 
tative of Komantic prose-artists. More pertina- 
ciously than any other prose-writer he tries to carry 
prose beyond its old-time boundaries and to give it 
a new emotional and imaginative scope. Perhaps 
the most persistent mannerism to be traced in his 
methods of communicating impressions of beauty 
and power is his frequent recourse to a kind of vis- 
ionary second-sight. Doubtless this trick of mind 
and of treatment was fostered, if nothing more, by 
his opium-eating. The beauty of the trance, the 
splendour of the vision, the mystery of the seventh 
heaven and of Plato's sphere lie over the most 
characteristic scenes of his prose. The chambers 
of the air suddenly open, and on some insignifi- 
cant portion of common life there rains down influ- 
ence through infinite distances from a mysterious 
spiritual world, which thus reveals itself as em- 
bracing common life, pressing upon it as it were 
on all sides, though from measureless distances, 
terribly involving it in momentous issues for good 
or evil. The mysteries that infinite space may 



22 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

hold in concealment, the mysteries that may have 
been enacted in past aeons of time, or that still 
may be waiting in endless perspective — these De 
Quincey suggests with necromantic power, so that 
before them the imagination is appalled. More- 
over, he is often not content with suggesting these 
mysteries vaguely or symbolically; he actually 
opens before his readers, through the use of elabo- 
rately picturesque imagery, endless vistas to the 
outermost walls of space ; or he dizzies the mind 
with ingenious mimicry of the never-ending flight 
of hours and days and years and centuries. Even 
in dealing with historical subjects, De Quincey, if 
he is bent on artistic effect, is apt to use, in work- 
ing out his material, many of these same methods, 
so as to produce a visionary representation of life 
that carries with it an atmosphere of mysterjr and 
that at the same time has sensuous splendour. His 
Flight of a Tartar Tribe is the Rime of the Ancient 
Mariner done into prose, with a whole people's 
wanderings for the motif instead of one poor sea- 
man's misadventure; De Quincey 's prose almost 
rivals Coleridge's verse in giving to a tale the 
strenuous movement, the sustained sensuousness, 
as well as the mysteriousness, of a dream. What- 
ever enters into De Quincey's mind, — whether it 
be Oxford Street, or a wandering Malay, or poor 
Ann, the London waif, or Joan of Arc, — is trans- 
formed when it appears in his impassioned prose, in 
this same marvellous fashion, rendered exceeding 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 23 

mystical, shimmeringly beautiful, and irresistibly 
credible withal, as if it had indeed been spun into 
opium-visions by the "just, subtle, and mighty'^ 
spirit whose home was in the famous " little golden 
receptacle." One is sometimes tempted to make 
this spirit and this receptacle the symbol and the 
talisman of the whole Eomantic movement. 

The preceding analyses of poets and prose- 
writers will perhaps have justified in some measure 
the formulas which have been suggested as sum- 
ming up the most characteristic literature of the 
first quarter of our century. In England there was 
never a Eomantic school as there was in both Ger- 
many and France. The English poems and prose- 
writings which have just been analyzed were in 
many and important particulars radically and 
almost irreconcilably unlike. Their authors were 
never in league in the pursuit of a common and 
clearly recognized end, artistic or moral; indeed, 
they were often not personally known to each other, 
or they were even outspoken foes. Yet, as it were 
in spite of themselves, they gave to their poems 
and their prose certain common characteristics; 
their imaginations, through a sort of secret under- 
standing, acknowledged a kinship, which the men 
themselves would have been the last to claim. So, 
for example, there is a curious likeness to be traced 
in the heroes of the great poems of this period. 
These heroes — whether Greek Endymions, mock- 
mediseval Childe Harolds, Cumberland Pedlars, or 



24 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

worshippers of Alastor — are all lonely, dreamy 
wanderers. They are adventurers in the world of 
the spirit, searchers after new sensations, new 
moods, new strains of passion, "ideal-blind" en- 
thusiasts of one sort or another. They are questers 
after the Holy Grail, followers of the vision, 
aspirers after some new form of the blessed life. 
They all trust the imagination and the heart and 
have scant respect for the understanding and the 
reason. And this striking similarity of theirs 
comes from the fact that, diverse as they are in 
equipment and in fortune, they are one and all 
essentially personifications of the spirit of a Koman- 
tic age, and symbolize in their ambitions its one 
preoccupation. The Romantic imagination, through 
its inevitable bias toward the creation of these 
dreamy wanderers, reveals the essential striving of 
the Romantic movement. 

The age was an age of expansion. The human 
spirit was reaching out delicately or strenuously in 
many ways for new forms of experience. It was 
emancipating itself once and for all from the hard 
and fast restrictions of prosaic eighteenth-century 
life. It sought out and conned the story of its own 
past, and found there a ncCice passionateness and 
a decorative splendour which rationalism and 
"refinement" had later drained from both national 
and individual life, and which the new age was 
longing to realize once more in its own experience. 
The heart, the senses, and the imagination reas- 



THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 25 

serted their rights after the long tyranny of the 
understanding. The senses became alert and 
thrillingly sensitive; they learned to catch all the 
pretty configuration and the shadow-play of the 
surface of the earth; and they gathered, too, 
the impressions of awful beauty and power in 
nature to which the eighteenth century had been 
blind. Moreover, beneath what the tremulous 
senses discerned in nature, the quickened spirit 
divined everywhere a subtle play of energy cor- 
respondent to its own, and it dreamed the dream of 
transcendentalism and found the universe instinct 
with symbolism and spiritual meanings. In short, 
the whole nature of man was once more vitalized 
into free, confident play after the long period of 
paralyzing over-intellectualism which had so curi- 
ously prevailed since the days of Descartes and 
Hobbes. And as the result of this mysticism and 
passion and audacious dreaming, the human spirit 
won many new aptitudes and new powers and 
acquired a new range of sensitiveness to a myriad 
hitherto unperceived shades of beauty and feeling. 
But all this was accomplished at the risk or the 
expense of conventional society. These dreamers, 
both the poets themselves and their heroes, were 
scorners of commonplace life, and cultivated their 
souls at the expense of their citizenship. Not one 
of Byron's or Shelley's or Keats's heroes can 
be pictured going intelligently and successfully 
through the ordinary round of a sane man's duties. 



26 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 

A state whose citizens should frame themselves on 
the model of Childe Harold or Laon or even of 
Wordsworth's Pedlar would soon be brought into 
a very sadly disorganized plight. Moreover, the 
unregulated wills, the morbid nerves, and the 
erratic lives of the poets themselves, — these, too, 
seemed almost to offer palpable proof of the ab- 
surdity of the ideals that the poets embodied in 
their verse. And so it was that in the character- 
istic literature of the period that followed the age 
of Romanticism, remote and untempered Romantic 
dreaming was indulged in with less and less con- 
fidence — sometimes, perhaps, with self-conscious 
saduess, or with self-pitying scorn, or with despair- 
ing regret, but hardly at all with the old-time 
fervent faith; and men turned back to conven- 
tional life with a sense that it must after some 
fashion be reckoned with more seriously than 
the Idealists and the Romanticists had been apt 
to think. 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL 
LIFE 

By 1824 the Eomantic impulse, pure and simple, 
had in poetry very nearly spent its creative force. 
Keats and Shelley were dead. Scott was long since 
given over to prose. Coleridge was spinning meta- 
physical webs in the fastnesses of Highgate. Even 
Wordsworth, who lived half through the century, 
published after 1824 only a single volume of verse 
that had not been written long before that date. 
In 1824, too, Byron died and Carlyle, the great 
prose-foe of Byronic Welt-Sclimerz, published his 
first volume — significantly enough a translation of 
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. The wayward dreaming 
of "Romanticism had had its day, and in the char- 
acteristic poetry of the following period a new re- 
lation to the conventional world of everyday fact 
showed itself continually. 

Great as were the gains that accrued to the 
human spirit from the Eomanticists' passionate 
questing after new experience of all sorts, the 
limitations of the Eomantic genius, and its danger- 
ous eccentricities became clearer and clearer as 
this genius worked itself out into thorough expres- 
sion. The Eomanticists were web-spinners and 
27 



28 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

fancy-mongers, who were apt to move through life 
in a kind of divine bewilderment. They were 
beauty-blind and music-deaf. They lived inside 
their own individual heads, in the circle of their 
own eccentric personalities, — in fantastic air-spun 
worlds of their own devising. They had little wish 
or power to grapple with commonplace facts either 
in life or in art. The world portrayed in their 
poetry is a visionary world quite out of the ken 
of ordinary folk, surcharged with strangeness, and 
treacherous to the uninitiated. Their favourite 
characters are uncanny creatures, spectral, prone to 
posing, psychologically shallow. Fancy Dr. Samuel 
Johnson's growls of disapproval at the Wanderer 
in Shelley's Alastor, who goes soliloquizing through 
impossible landscapes on a hopeless quest for im- 
possible beauty, and dies in despair to the light of 
an impossible moon. Thomas Love Peacock has 
put into a cleverly satirical summary the essential 
absurdity that seems to the worldly-wise man to 
lurk in Byron's romantic despair: "You talk," 
says Mr. Hilary to Mr. Cypress, "like a Rosi- 
crucian who will love nothing but a sylph, who 
does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and 
who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not 
containing a sylph." The wordly-wise man does 
not stake his happiness on the problematical 
favours of an ideal that would not exist unless 
he himself took the trouble to call it into being. 
Romantic dreamers were victims of their own mag- 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 29 

gots, so it seemed to the common-sense onlooker; 
and incontestably their overmuch indulgence in 
dreaming tended to destroy in them the controlling 
sense of their kinship with ordinary men. All of 
them, save perhaps Scott, made war, though with 
varying degrees of bitterness, on custom and con- 
vention. They were creatures of whim and caprice. 
They shunned the routine of ordinary life. They 
sought to wrest for themselves from the world, each 
in his own way, some individual bliss. Even the 
moral Wordsworth went ^* booing'' his verses over 
the Westmoreland hills in a fashion that would 
have made Jeffrey gasp and stare. Their heroes, 
from Byron's and Shelley's adventurers to Words- 
worth's Peter Bell and Idiot Boy, were at odds with 
society. Consciously or unconsciously the Roman- 
ticists were preaching the gospel of fad and of ec- 
centricity. They were underrating the worth of 
tradition and precedent and the established order. 
They were audaciously challenging reason and com- 
mon sense, and were letting impulse and unauthen- 
ticated instinct run riot. In their fostering of 
spirit they became sadly contemptuous of the in- 
tricate relationships — prejudices, beliefs, customs, 
fashions, laws — that unite actual living men and 
women into a complex, prosperously working social 
organism. Eomantic poets had a genius for tran- 
scending everyday concerns and the facts and per- 
sonages of the work-day world. God, Freedom, 
Immortality, Nature — these were the presences 



30 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

and the themes that fixed their gaze and domi- 
nated their imaginations. Their own souls, their 
own moods, their exaltations and despairs, their 
aspirations toward the infinite, their languors or 
ecstasies on the moors or beside the , sea-breakers 
or under the free cope of heaven, — these were 
their preoccupations, not the turmoil of the town 
or the complexities of actual human character. 
Their poetry was the expression of brooding lone- 
liness and concerned their own relations to God 
and to Nature, not their relations to other men. 
As a consequence of all this it followed that Eo- 
manticism bid fair to lead to social disintegration ; 
or at any rate, it encouraged and fostered a wide 
variety of dangerously morbid individualities hard 
to be reconciled and welded together into a well- 
wrought social fabric. Because of its subjectivity, 
its whimsical emotionalism, its wayward imagina- 
tiveness, Komanticism tended, while developing 
the individual spirit into rich variety of life, to 
shatter conventional society, and to replace its 
compact organization of harmonious types with a 
loosely related mass of abnormal personalities. 
One cannot but sympathize with Matthew Arnold's 
impatient outcry over Shelley's droll domesticity. 
Brook Farm in America was for a time very ap- 
petizing make-believe, but it had not within its 
organization the blood and the sinew of reality 
necessary to insure permanence and complexity 
of life. 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 31 

Such were in general the dangerous tendencies 
that after 1824 were more and more clearly dis- 
ce'rned in Eomanticism ; and it was because of this 
discernment that the characteristic poetry of the 
following period took a new tone and a new direc- 
tion. Not, however, that the poetry of the later 
period repudiated Romance; not that it returned 
to the arid intellectual habit of eighteenth-century 
life. What it really aimed to do was to avoid the 
extravagance of the Romanticists and to realize 
more intimately and successfully what was vital 
and quintessential in Idealism. The new poets 
took into their blood and tempers the Romantic 
increment ; they taught their hearts to beat to the 
tunes of Romantic rhythms; their senses were 
trained to all the delicacy and alertness that Ro- 
mantic experience made possible; their imagina- 
tions ran to and fro through nature with much of 
the fine Romantic instinct for hidden symbolism. 
They dreamed the dreams of the Romanticists, and 
yielded themselves with one and another Romantic 
seer to the Vision on the Mount. But they could 
not be content with the evasive visionariness of 
Romanticism or with its remoteness from actual 
life. They felt more and more keenly the claims 
of the commonplace and the conventional. They 
saw the evil trick of Romance — its way of dispers- 
ing itself in iridescent mists and leaving the crass 
world of fact still unlovely and sordid. And so 
they came to feel the need of bringing down the 



32 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

Vision on the Mount, the Idealists' dream of 
beauty, into the rumouring, turbulent life below, 
and of converting Eomance into a vital transform- 
ing force that should actually recreate in terms of 
beauty that common life, a loyal sharing in which 
can alone enable the individual, be he dreamer or 
worker, to fulfil the whole scope of his nature and 
reach his utmost effectiveness. A persistent striv- 
ing to secure a synthesis between the Ideal and the 
Actual is characteristic of the poetry of the post- 
Eomantic period. 

This period extends roughly to 1860, and in- 
cludes the most important poems of Arthur Hugh 
Clough, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Matthew 
Arnold; its typical representative in prose is 
Thomas Carlyle. Much of the work of Tennyson 
and Browning was also given to the world before 
1860; but these poets passed beyond the post- 
Romantic period both in the years of their activity 
and in the spirit in which they interpreted life; 
and they can therefore be better considered by 
themselves. 

Arthur Hugh Clough cannot be ranked, on the 
basis of pure poetic achievement, in the same class 
with Arnold and Mrs. Browning. He has left, to 
be sure, in the Bothie of Tober na Vuolich, a 
richly fragrant idyll of country life, which is 
almost unique in its union of humour and transfigur- 
ing passion in the treatment of everyday English 
incident. A few of his lyrics, too, where fate 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 33 

seems to have guided him into melody, are memo- 
rable for their simple beauty of phrase as well as 
for their spiritual ardour. But in the main — let it 
be said with all possible respect to his eulogist in 
Thyrsis — Clough was but a bungling workman 
in verse. He must nearly always be read with 
allowances. And yet his poetrj'- is historically of 
high interest because of its sensitive reflection of 
the spirit of his age. His Dipsychus is a deli- 
cately sure, analytic record, half-lyrical and half- 
dramatic, of the typical moods of sad recollection, 
distrust, hesitation, and final acquiescence, with 
which many men of his day, who had listened long 
to the music of romantic poetry, turned back at 
last from vague dreaming and laid hold of the 
tasks of conventional life. 

The scene of the poem is laid in Venice, and at 
the start the hero, Dipsychus, the Double-minded, 
a young Englishman, of exceptional fineness of 
temperament, comes before us very much in the 
guise of one of the Romantic Wanderers of the pre- 
ceding poetic age. He soliloquizes over the fantas- 
tic splendour of the scenes around him, bewails in 
good set terms the vileness of human society, and 
turns with true Romantic queasiness to nature for 
consolation : — 

♦' Clear stars above, thou roseate westward sky, 
Take up my being into yours ; assume 
My sense to know you only ; steep my brain 
In your essential purity.*' 

D 



34 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

Significantly, however, this early passage is the 
only one in the poem where Nature is apostro- 
phized or where the suffering special soul turns 
to her for refuge from actual life. Moreover, in 
Clough's poem, the reader feels from the very start 
that he is looking out upon actual throngs of mov- 
ing men and women, is caught in the veritable swirl 
of the world's business, and is not, as he always is 
in reading the Eomantic poets, wandering in some 
excellent remote region filled with dream-splendours 
and a fantastic populace. 

As the poem goes on, Dipsychus scans the drama 
of conventional life, feels the charm of its whim 
and vigour and brilliance, is stirred with a sense 
of its energy and stupendous, unquestioning onrush 
after tangible good; and yet he revolts from its 
selfishness, its carnal preoccupations, its pitiful 
narrowness of interest, and its inveterate frivolity. 
He glides in a gondola through all the gnarring 
turmoil as one might let one's self be swept by a 
dream safely through uncanny noises and threaten- 
ing complications; he lulls himself with fancies 
of what the world ought to be and with the images 
of beauty and truth that his heart summons before 
him. And as he feeds his desire on these golden 
imaginations, the refrain sounds again and again 
in an undertone, — 

" Life should be as the gondola." • 

At last, however, when he sets foot on shore, he 
sadly concedes that " Life is not as the gondola j '' 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 35 

and he passes into a new mood. Life is not dream- 
ing, it is action ; " live we must ; " and he turns to 
the Spirit of this World who has been all the time 
beside him, carping Mephistopheles-wise at what 
he deems Dipsychus's sentimental maunderings, 
and demands how he is to become practical and 
mingle successfully in the great game of life. 

The Spirit in answer welcomes with fine satirical 
humour the prodigal who seems repenting of his 
idealism. He ridicules Dipsychus's late dreams as 
" but moonshine after all," *^ airy blisses, skiey joys, 
of vague romantic girls and boys." He reproaches 
him with having made " mows to the blank sky " 
quite long enough. He sneers at Dipsychus's silly 
slavery to deluding visions ; Dipsychus, he declares, 
has been walking about with his eyes shut, — 

** Treating for facts the self-made hues that flash 
On tight-pressed pupils." 

And finally he chants a prettily satirical lyric in 
praise of submission to the God of this World : — 

*' Submit, submit ! 
For tell me then, in earth's great laws 
Have you found any saving clause, 
Exemption special granted you 
From doing what the rest must do ? 
Of common sense who made you quit 
And told you you'd no need of it, 
Nor to submit ? 

*' To move on angel's wings were sweet ; 
But who would therefore scorn his feet ? 



36 THE KETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

It cannot walk up to the sky ; 
It therefore will lie down and die. 
Rich meats it don't obtain at call ; 
It therefore will not eat at all. 
Poor babe, and yet a babe of wit ! 
But common-sense, not much of it, 
Or 'twould submit. 
Submit, submit!" 

After a good deal of crackling badinage of this 
sort, the Spirit finally grows more serious, promises 
to teach Dipsychus "the Second Eeverence — for 
things around, " — the allusion to Goethe is worth 
noting, — and sets forth the absolute need there is 
for the individual to accept the bonds of custom- 
ary life with all their chafing limitations, if he is 
not to be a mere helpless, fantastic, isolated unit. 

" This stern necessity of things 
On every side our being rings ; 
Our sallying eager actions fall 
Vainly against that iron wall. 
Where once her finger points the way, 
The wise thinks only to obey ; 
Take life as she has ordered it, 
And come what may of it, submit, 
Submit, submit." 

During all the Spirit's raillery and haranguing, 
Dipsychus has been considering and reconsider- 
ing his relation to the world. He has felt the 
cogency of the Spirit^s words ; he has realized his 
own remoteness from fact, his impotence, his idle 
dreaminess. Yet he has shrunk from the sordid- 
ness of common life; he has rebelled against the 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 37 

need of losing his personal stamp and becoming a 
mere unrecognizable portion of the world^s mechan- 
ical routine ; he has inveighed against the triviality 
and commonness of the tasks at which the indi- 
vidual must set himself, and against the lack of all 
chance for original and noble effort; and he has 
bewailed the apparent aimlessness of the stupid 
world-process to which he must enslave himself. 
Nevertheless he finally makes his choice and com- 
mits himself to the region of fact. 

Yet after all it is not to the power of the half- 
malevolent Spirit of this World that Dipsychus 
resigns his will; and just here lies the crucial 
difference by virtue of which the conventionality of 
the new age was to be something far nobler than 
the conventionality of the eighteenth century. 
Although Dipsychus finally elects for the world 
of action and resigns himself to practical life, he. 
nevertheless remains in his heart true to his ideal- 
istic dreaming. He declares himself, perhaps a bit 
grotesquely, "a kidnapped child of heaven"; and 
it is with the memory of his celestial origin still 
alive and active within him that he surrenders him- 
self to temporary thraldom. So he exclaims to the 
Spirit of this World : — 

" Not for thy service, thou imperious fiend, 
Not to do thy work, or the like of thine ; 
Not to please thee, O base and fallen spirit ! 
But One Most High, Most True, whom without thee 
It seems I cannot serve. O the misery 
That one must truck and practise with the world 



38 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

To gain the vantage-ground to assail it from ; 
To set upon the Giant one must first, 
O Perfidy ! have eat the Giant's bread. 
If I submit, it is but to gain time 
And arms and stature." 

And so the Dreamer enters the field of action with 
the resolve to utilize loyally the delicacy, the sen- 
sitiveness, the spiritual alertness that the Koman- 
ticists have developed in him, to embody in the 
harsh material of conventional fact the dreams he 
has long nourished, and to realize in the regions of 
common endeavour the Vision on the Mount. 

In Mrs. Browning's poetry there is both more and 
less Romanticism than in Clough's. In many ways 
she seemed doomed in the very nature of things to 
be a mere dreamer; as a woman, with a woman's 
tremulous nerve-fibres and delicate sensibility, as a 
woman of genius, and, therefore, exceptionally im- 
pressionable and imaginative, and, above all as an 
invalid, shut for many years within the hothouse 
precincts of a sick-chamber, she seemed consigned 
beyond redress to a life of subjective moodiness 
and of visionary remoteness from fact. Yet in 
truth in reading her poetry we are taken far more 
into the thick of the tumult of living, into the 
murk and the flaring confusion, and among the 
blows and the counter-blows of the actual battle of 
life than we are in reading Keats or Shelley, or in- 
deed any of the Romanticists. She belonged vitally 
to her age. Even in her solitude she had felt the 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 39 

stream of tendency that was setting back toward 
conventional life. Her longer poems, Casa Guidi 
Windows, Lady Geraldine's Courtship, Aurora 
Leigh, all strive to catch the very lineaments of 
the human drama that was around her as she 
wrote. 

And indeed that Art should thus deal courageously 
with the immediate facts of daily life was a cardinal 
tenet of Mrs. Browning's. She has expounded her 
Theory of Art elaborately in various parts of Avr 
rora Leigh, — a theory too involved and abstract 
to be summarized here. An essential part of the 
theory, however, is her conception of the poet's task 
and of his relations to his fellows. The poet is not 
to be a weaver of visions, a spinner of decorative 
beauty, or a lonely specialist in eccentric moods; 
he is to be " God's truth-teller," the authentic inter- 
preter of the innermost meaning of daily events, 
the revealer of the core of spiritual energy that 
utters itself sensuously in the often apparently 
haphazard fact and incident of the cosmic-process. 
He is not to run like a recreant to the past in search 
of his subjects : " I do distrust," Mrs. Browning 
declares, 

" the poet who discerns 
No character or glory in his times, 
And trundles back his soul five hundred years, 
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court.'* 

He is to preserve in his verse the living image of 
his own day and generation : — 



40 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

"Never flinch, 
But still unscrupulously epic, catch 
Upon the burning lava of a song 
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted age." 

He should be able to find even in the most sordid 
aspects of life, and in the most seemingly vulgar 
characters, meaning and suggestiveness that shall 
redeem them and give them imaginative power : — 

*' Humanity is great ; 
And if I would not rather pore upon 
An ounce of common, ugly human dust, 
An artisan's palm or a peasant's brow, 
Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God, 
Than track old Nilus to his silver roots, 
And wait on all the changes of the moon 
Among the mountain peaks of Tuscany, 
(Until her magic crystal round itself 
For many a witch to see in) — set it down 
As weakness, — strength by no means." 

Mrs. Browning's longest narrative poem, Avr 
rora Leigh, is conceived and wrought out in close 
harmony with these ideals of what should be the 
sphere and the aim of poetry. The story concerns 
the life of a young girl, half-Italian and half- 
English, who grows up in an old-fashioned country 
house in England in the midst of books and of 
nature, who chooses letters for a profession, and 
who goes to London and captures the world with 
her poetry. Her love for her cousin — a keenly 
intellectual social reformer, an apostle of statistics 
and political economy — furnishes the conventional 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 41 

motif of passion for the narrative. But though 
thus ostensibly portraying the life of a visionary 
girl and though continually revealing the world 
through her eyes, the poem is really an interpreta- 
tion and criticism of the entire age in which it was 
written. The characters are drawn from the whole 
range of English society; the incident is widely 
varied and typical, and yet not extravagant or out 
of the bounds of daily experience ; the analysis of 
motive, and of the play of the social forces which 
in large measure determine the action, is searching 
and suggestive; and the poem is continually — too 
continually for the taste of some uncourageous 
readers — unfolding the ways of God to man as 
they reveal themselves through the fortunes and 
the fates of the actors in the story. There is 
withal much glowing rhetoric — often brilliantly 
imaginative, albeit sometimes florid and hysterical 
— concerning the economic and social and artistic 
questions that were most canvassed in the later 
fifties. And everywhere the reader is kept within 
sound of the busy rumour of daily life : he breathes 
the actual air of the smoky London streets; he 
explores squalid tenements; he watches the pag- 
eantry of church weddings; he flashes on railway 
journeys across the continent ; he is never for long 
allowed to lose sight of the expressive visage of the 
great world of fact. 

As a result of her absorbing interest in the human 
drama, nature plays no such role in Mrs. Browning's 



42 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

poetry as with the Komanticists. Nature she knows 
with an intimate command of detail that is surpris- 
ing when one thinks of her long years of illness. 
But she never or rarely makes a deliberate emo- 
tional study of nature for its own sake or gives 
herself over to lonely dreaming in the midst of 
nature. She offers her readers no lyric of the West 
Wind or of the Skylark or of Mont Blanc, and no 
" Tintern Abbey." She sees nature a trifle askance ; 
she cannot for long in her narrative poems desert 
her men and women ; and even in her shorter poems, 
it is with the human heart — not perhaps her own 
— that her imagination busies itself rather than 
with nature. Nature is secondary with her. True, 
some of her passing sketches of landscapes are 
surprisingly broad and vigorous — as, for example, 
that of the Alps from the train on the way to Italy. 
Moreover, in one other kind of sketching from the 
outside world, Mrs. Browning attains almost unique 
brilliance and truth of effect, namely, in her swift 
impressions of great cities : — 

"So, I mused 
Up and down, up and down, the terraced streets, 
The glittering Boulevards, the white colonnades 
Of fair fantastic Paris who wears trees 
Like plumes, as if man made them ; spire and tower 
As if they had grown by nature, tossing up 
Her fountains in the sunshine of the squares." 

The beauty of Paris, a beauty that seems all spun 
of gossamer and silver, and the spacious, airy ways 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 43 

of the city, could hardly be more delicately and 
surely captured and suggested. There are parallel 
studies of London — smudgy, and done in India ink 
— which give the very texture of London air and 
the slant of London roofs and chimney-pots. Flor- 
ence, too, Mrs. Browning puts impressionistically 
before us with the same dexterous touch, — Florence 
gleaming in Italian sunshine and with proper atmos- 
pheric modulations. But all these sketches are, of 
course, not of nature pure and simple, but of man's 
handiwork in the outside world ; so that here again 
Mrs. Browning diverges from Romantic paths ; she 
turns from nature back toward man. 

Yet, be it always remembered, she brings back 
with her to real life, as Clough and his hero brought, 
though even more valorously, faith in the ideal; 
and she interprets both nature and man with a 
sensitiveness and an insight that the Eomanticists 
had alone made possible. Her whole theory of art 
and of life involved a far-reaching and uncompro- 
mising idealism. There is a long passage in the 
seventh book of Aicrora Leigh that gives to this 
idealism brilliantly imaginative and yet fairly for- 
mal expression, and brings it into close connection 
with those conceptions of the poet and the artist as 
revealers of hidden truth that have already been 
noted. 

" A twofold world 
Must go to a perfect cosmos. Natural things 
And spiritual, — who separates those two 



44 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

In art, in morals, or the social drift. 
Tears up the bond of Nature and brings death, 
Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse, 
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men, 
Is wrong in short at all points. 



" Without the spiritual, observe, 
The natural 's impossible ; no form, 
No motion ! Without sensuous, spiritual 
Is inappreciable ; — no beauty or power : 
And in this twofold sphere the twofold man 
(And still the artist is intensely a man) 
Holds firmly by the natural, to reach 
The spiritual beyond it, — fixes still 
The type with mortal vision, to pierce through, 
With eyes immortal, to the antetype 
Some call the ideal." 

In accordance with this doctrine, Mrs. Browning, 
in her portrayal of conventional life, tries to exhibit 
the forces that in the midst of the most prosaic 
conditions are at work for the realization of ideal 
ends ; she aims to confer dignity and splendour upon 
human existence by showing that even in its worst 
complications of sorrow and evil there are beauty 
and good in the making. And thus she endeavours 
to bring about that synthesis between the Ideal 
and the Actual of which the post-Romanticists so 
keenly felt the need. 

In the preface to one of his volumes of verse, 
Matthew Arnold definitely condemned the personal 
point of view of the Eomanticists as unfitted for 
the creation of poetry of the highest order. The 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 45 

poet, he urged, should be objective ; he should emu- 
late pagan art in its tempera teness of mood, its 
fine severity, and its burnished beauty. But when 
Arnold came to put his doctrine to the test, he 
found that the spirit of the age was not to be thus 
easily defied; that its vital impulse was not to be 
held in check simply at the dictates of an academic 
ideal. Arnold had " learnt the lore " of the Eoman- 
ticists "too well," and he could not keep out of 
his verse the recollected airs of Eomantic art. His 
Sohrah and Rustum and Balder Dead, written in 
loyal illustration of his theory, are at best fairly 
proficient academic exercises — too late to take the 
Newdigate prize. The poems by virtue of which 
he lives are for the most part those in which 
his personal moods utter themselves sincerely — 
moods of tender grieving for the recollected glory 
of the Eomantic age. M. Zola has described some 
living French poet as having been touched by the 
chilling finger of science. The phrase fits Arnold 
well. He had been in his youth, as he himself 
records in more than one poem, fervently enam- 
oured of Eomantic ideals; but he had later lost 
the power of yielding himself to them uncritically 
and sincerely. His most characteristic note is an 
elegiac note of regret for the waning of the glories 
of the earlier age when faith was still on the earth. 
He is the poet of a lost cause — the lost cause of 
Romance . 
Arnold's treatment of what may be called the 



46 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

Wanderer-mo^i/" makes clear the change of mood 
that parts him from the Eomanticists. The tra- 
ditional Wanderer of the Romantic poets is wholly 
the victim of his own joy or teen; he follows 
through regions of fantastic beauty after some elu- 
sive ideal of passionate bliss ; he believes in him- 
self utterly, whether he be Byron's Childe Harold 
or one of Shelley's wan poets; and his creators too 
— they believe in him implicitly and recount with 
poignant sincerity his spiritual joys and woes. He 
is indeed the imaginative embodiment of their 
most vital impulse — their vagrant, unresting pur- 
suit of new modes of bliss and pain, of new forms 
of spiritual experience. Arnold's imagination has 
also busied itself more than once with the fate of 
a Wanderer — notably in the Scholar- Gypsy and in 
Thy r sis. The Scholar-Gypsy, as one first encoun- 
ters him, seems to have much of the old-time 
Romantic turn of figure and cast of countenance ; 
every one remembers his "dark, vague eyes and 
soft, abstracted air"; and every one remembers, 
too, how he is represented in Thyrsis as seeking, 
apparently in true Romantic wise, " a fugitive and 
gracious light . . . shy to illumine"; he "wends 
unfollowed"; he "must house alone"; onward 
"he fares by his own heart inspired." Yet in 
spite of the seeming resemblance of Arnold's Wan- 
derers to the Romantic type, a little analysis will 
show that the play of the poet's imagination as it 
creates these later Wanderers is very different from 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 47 

that whicli wrouglit out the Wanderers of an earlier 
age ; and that the world through which these later 
Wanderers dream their way has also changed in 
significant wise. Arnold's poems about Wander- 
ers are all confessedly tender make-believe — ex- 
quisitely refined elaborations of an artistic theme; 
the Scholar-Gypsy is merely a legendary figure 
which Arnold's imagination captures from the 
pages of Glanvil and shapes with sad and gracious 
art into a symbol of Idealism. Throughout the 
poem, while this charming visionary Wanderer is 
"waiting for the spark from heaven," he is fol- 
lowed by regretful and — shall we say? — half- 
patronizing, worldly - wise onlookers, — " light 
half -believers of our casual creeds," — whose 
" vague resolves " and speculative disillusionment 
set the standard of fact and convert the Scholar- 
Gypsy into a mere pathetic, though lovely, wraith. 
He is a phantom, for whose apparition the poet, 
tenderly as he treats him, half apologizes. And 
the landscapes that he wanders through — these, 
too, are very different from purely Eomantic land- 
scapes, from the landscapes, for example, in 
Alastor. They have none of the courageous and 
persuasive falseness of Shelley's landscapes. Over 
them there broods "the soft canopy of English 
air " ; they are wrought out with loving fidelity of 
detail; their "scarlet poppies," their "wide fields 
of breezy grass," their "green-muffled Cumner 
hills," and the rural figures, too, that move in the 



48 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

midst of familiar scenes through homely rustic 
tasks, all have the colour and accent of actual Eng- 
lish life. They are incontestably real, and their 
delicate truth and good faith but make the flitting 
figure of the Scholar-Gypsy seem the more elusive, 
and render him the more unmistakably a symbol, 
imaginatively wrought out with conscious artistry. 
For Arnold, Idealism has become but an undetain- 
able reminiscence; the world of exquisite natural 
fact defeats, even against the poet's wish, the spirit 
of Romance. 

This same tenderly heroic loyalty to ideals that 
are still felt to be half -futile is expressed in the 
famous Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, A 
very well-known passage in the poem sets definitely 
over against each other the earlier world of the 
idealists and the modern world of conventional 
experience — the flaunting world of science and 
triumphant fact. Arnold elects for the world of 
dreamers; his heart is with the "shy recluses," 
inheritors of the spirit of a visionary age, who 
cannot reconcile themselves to the bewildering, 
albeit splendid, pageantry of actual life. The pas- 
sage is almost too trite to quote; but its extreme 
appositeness will justify it. 

*' Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
The other powerless to be born, 
With nowhere yet to rest my head, 
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. 
Their faith, my tears, the world deride — 
I come to shed them at their side." 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 49 

There follows in the poem a brilliantly picturesque 
passage describing the joy and the splendour of 
worldly life : troops flash by in the sun with pen- 
nons and plumes and lances; hunters gather and 
staghounds bay; the laughter and the silver speech 
of gay women and men float by with the bugle-calls 
on the breeze. But from all this brightness and 
music, which the poet's imagination conjures up, 
symbolizing the glitter and the indomitable energy 
of actual life, he turns back to the " shy recluses " 
whose world is the world of dreams and of conse- 
cration to the inner life. And so it is with Arnold 
again and again in his poetry; the fanfare of the 
present strikes dauntingly and with disillusioning 
power through the tender music of Eomantic dream- 
ing; the poet hears the insistent summons, but 
turns away half -fearfully, half -piously, toward the 
ideals of a less strenuous age. 

Yet not even in his poetry is this Arnold's last 
word as to the worth of the world of everyday fact; 
nor is this his final imaginative appreciation of 
modern conventional life. The truth of the matter' 
is that Komantic dreaming was for Arnold possi- 
ble only in defiance of his conscience; the world 
of conventional fact had convicted him of sin, had 
imposed its claims upon him in spite of himself, 
and had made him feel that his duty lay in the 
acceptance of the commonplace and the fulfilment 
of everyday tasks. Accordingly, even in his poetry 
he substantially admits, as Clough admitted, that 



60 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

"fact must be fact, and life the thing it can." His 
acceptance of fact is never confident and grateful, 
never very hopeful. As he looks out on the mod- 
ern world he has much to say of his " dwindling 
faculty of joy"; of his soul which "perishes of 
cold"; of a "weariness" which "no energy can 
reach." He has much to say, too, of the unloveli- 
ness of the prospect that real life offers. Our age 
is "an iron time"; its wisdom is harshness; its 
gayety is frivolity. The world is made up of 
"triflers," who amiably while life away, or of 
slaves, who are dull victims of routine. Yet this 
world, unlovely as it is, is the world where, as 
Wordsworth urged, men must find their happiness 
or not at all. The wise man will accept the con- 
ditions of life — will "submit, submit." He must 
not "fly to dreams," yet he need not despair. He 
will learn "to neither strive nor cry." He will 
train himself to that "wide and luminous view" 
which substitutes for the petulance of individual 
desire the calm and the resignation of philosophy. 
He will open his soul to the temperate splendour 
of nature and will steady himself through watching 
and emulating her untroubled rhythms of achieve- 
ment. He will form himself in the spirit of her 
"greatness," will "rally the good in the depths" 
of himself, and "share in the world's toil." His 
faith in the ideal, he will retain as a kind of secret 
life — a " Buried Life " — whence he may draw in- 
spiration for his practical struggle with recalcitrant 
reality. 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 51 

Certainly there is nothing frolic or buoyant in 
this return of Arnold's to the regions of everyday 
fact. His home-coming almost suggests in its tem- 
pered meekness that of Goldsmith's Moses from 
the Fair with his famous gross of green spectacles. 
Yet Arnold has the pith of the matter in him ; he 
accepts the laws of the great game of life. And 
though his mood, when compared with that of 
Browning or of Walt Whitman, may seem at the 
best a mood of finely controlled disheartenment, 
yet that there was much conscientious courage and 
stern endurance beneath what sometimes seems 
the pose of "weariness," his strenuous discharge 
through a long period of time of exasperatingly 
prosaic duties makes clear beyond the possibility 
of a query or a quibble. 

During the last thirty years of his life, Arnold's 
medium of expression was almost wholly prose. 
His work during these years falls outside the period 
with which this essay is dealing, and is, moreover, 
in spirit and substance part and parcel of our mod- 
ern age. This much, however, must at least be 
said of his prose — that alike in its origin and in 
its execution, it bears witness to his faith in the 
possibility of a reconciliation between the ideal and 
the real. His turning to prose may perhaps not 
too fantastically be regarded as his frank accept- 
ance of conventional life with all its limitations. 
He turned to prose very much as Dipsychus finally 
submitted provisionally to the Power of this World. 



52 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

"Welcome, world, henceforth; and farewell 
dreams! " In the poem Obermann once More, there 
occurs a passage that seems meant by Arnold as an 
imaginative account of the purposes that guided 
him during his later life. The words are put into 
the mouth of the typical Eomantic dreamer, Ober- 
mann, who in the poem appears to Arnold in 
visionary wise. He describes the hard, pitiless 
splendour of the pagan world, the passion of ten- 
derness revealed in Christianity — in its Madonna- 
legend, its child-Christ, and its consolatory Man of 
Sorrows — the fervours of self-abnegation and of 
aspiring spirituality in Mediaevalism, the pathetic 
dissolution of its dream-world and the defeat of its 
hopes and purposes. For Senancour, the Romantic 
age was the age of vain regret over the vanishing 
of delicate spirituality and the waning of mystical 
ardour; and there is much in Arnold's verse that 
tallies with this limited conception of the Roman- 
tic temper. Obermann describes the tumult of 
grieving and the bitter confusion of soul that over- 
took the men of his own age as they looked out 
upon a half-ruinous, half-recreated society in an 
era that had none of the spiritual or imaginative 
charm that their hearts exacted. And then he im- 
poses upon his English follower the task of preserv- 
ing for the men of the cruder modern age whatever 
he may of the beauty and the truth and the in- 
spiriting power of mystical and Romantic ideals. 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 68 

*♦ Though more than half thy years be past, 
And spent thy youthful prime ; 
Though round thy firmer manhood cast, 
Hang weeds of our sad time 

"Whereof thy youth felt all the spell, 
And traversed all the shade — 
Though late, though dimm'd, though weak, yet tell 
Hope to a world new-made ! " 

And it was precisely to this task that Arnold 
devoted himself in his prose-writings. He sought 
to bring the real world into harmony, so far as he 
might, with what seemed to his mature thought 
best in Komantic ideals. He set himself with 
rigorous and patient minuteness and unfaltering 
ingenuity to a close struggle with the trivial and 
prosaic details of actual life. He contended 
against materialistic conceptions of life, against 
"machinery," and against the worship of the fa- 
vourite idols of a commercial and industrial age. 
He sought to quicken in his fellows the life of the 
spirit and to enlarge the range of their imagina- 
tions. He made familiar to Englishmen novel 
ideas and novel points of view derived from abroad. 
In every way he sought to increase the power of 
spiritual and poetic ideals, always within the lim- 
its imposed by a sane regard for conventional 
standards of thought and feeling and for the com- 
mon sense. One is sometimes tempted to say im- 
patiently that in his poetry Arnold^s typical hero 
is, after all, that philosophical poltroon Empedo- 



54 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

cles who, in despair over the unloveliness of actual 
life, flings himself headlong into a crater. Whether 
or no this be a fair charge, certain it is that in his 
prose criticism of life Arnold's model of all excel- 
lence, his lord and master, is Goethe, whose " large 
and luminous view " he sought loyally to attain to, 
and whose union of sane practicality with idealistic 
fervour he recommends and emulates. 

When we turn to Carlyle from Arnold we seem 
going back to an earlier age. Carlyle is far more 
audaciously loyal than Arnold to the idiom and the 
manner of the idealists. In Sartor Resartus he at 
times attacks the deadening power of custom and 
convention with almost the virulence of the revolu- 
tionists. Custom, he points out, makes " dotards " 
of us all, subjects us to routine, victimizes us and 
materializes us in countless ways. It is because 
of his desire to free men from conventional blind- 
ness that in Sartor Resartus he makes such persist- 
ent and often such grotesque use of the famous 
clothes-metaphor. He aims by the very grotesque- 
ness of his imagery to shock men out of their 
slavery to conventional ideas, to emancipate them 
from the customary, to stir them to a fresh envis- 
agement of the facts of life, to compel them to 
realize that their beliefs, their religious forms and 
creeds, their political institutions, their intellect- 
ual systems ought not to be adopted with the con- 
ventional nonchalance with which one accepts the 
traditional and correct thing in hats and trousers. 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 55 

In lieu of the materialistic and so-called common- 
sense notions about man and life and the universe 
that the ordinary Englishman unthinkingly con- 
tents himself with, Carlyle aims to substitute spir- 
itual and even mystical conceptions. He would 
replace, or at any rate supplement, eighteenth- 
century sound sense with German transcendental- 
ism. He quotes from that fierce realist, Swift, a 
definition of man, — "a forked, straddling animal 
with bandy legs," — and adds, "yet also a Spirit, 
and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries." This is 
typical of Carlyle's method and aim. He was the 
first Englishman to deal victoriously in widely 
read prose with^that fallacious and cynical distrust 
of genius and imagination and of all the more mys- 
terious elements in human nature which had ruled 
English thought and literature since at least the 
days of Swift. 

Carlyle's transcendentalism, as expounded in 
Sartor Resartus, is, of course, nowadays an old and 
somewhat discredited story. Transcendentalism 
is apt to seem to the modern mind simply one of 
the beautiful vagaries of a web-spinning age. Yet 
very beautiful it still is as one follows its elabora- 
tion in Carlyle's richly imaginative dialect. And 
by more than one generation of readers it has been 
welcomed with the utmost eagerness as a prevailing 
defence against those mechanical theories of the 
universe that so thrive among English Philistines. 
For Carlyle, the only two realities in the universe 



66 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

are the Divine Will and the Human Will. Nature 
is a mass of beautiful sensuous symbols whereby 
God speaks to the human soul. The world is " but 
an air-image." Man's body is "dust and shadow; 
a shadow-system gathered round our Me, wherein, 
through some moments or years, the Divine Es- 
sence is to be revealed in the Flesh." Laws, 
religious beliefs and ceremonies, artistic methods, 
political institutions, are merely the spiritual forms 
through which man's ceaseless striving for ideal 
ends records its progress and seeks to make this 
progress continuous and permanent ; their dwelling 
is in the mind of man, and their life from genera- 
tion to generation is a spiritual life. Cities, tilled 
fields, books — these, too, are but treasuries in 
which infinite spiritual energy has been stored 
through the past experience of the race. "So 
spiritual is our whole daily Life ; all that we do 
springs out of Mystery, Spirit, invisible Force; 
only like a little Cloud-image, or Armida's Palace, 
air-built, does the Actual body itself forth from 
the great mystic Deep." And so Carlyle's imagi- 
nation ranges far and wide among the records of 
civilization, through the regions of nature, over the 
revolving earth-ball, and throughout the Cosmos, 
finding underneath material disguises spirit- 
ual energy everywhere in play. He unbuilds the 
seemingly solid frame of the universe and dissolves 
its base corporeal substance; he refines away all 
perturbing alloy until he reveals everywhere the 



THE EETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 57 

pulsing energy of pure spirit, Human Power and 
Divine Power weaving tirelessly the fabric of 
existence. 

Yet in spite of all his magniloquent dreaming, 
Carlyle is true, or means to be true, to the uncom- 
promising facts of life; he dreams only that he 
may the more victoriously labour; and in his Gos- 
pel of Work and his doctrine of Hero-worship he 
returns from the misty regions of transcendental- 
ism and confronts the practical concerns of common 
life. No one is more contemptuous than Carlyle 
of dilettante web-spinning or of idle playing with 
emotion. Byron's egoistic woe, he scorns and 
ridicules. One of his mandates in Sartor Besartus V 
is "Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe." "What 
if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, 
but to be Unhappy ! Art thou nothing other than 
a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe 
seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dole- 
fully because carrion enough is not given thee?" 
All the private, individual grieving which the Ro- 
manticists had so plangently or so delicately and 
picturesquely phrased for the delectation of their 
age, Carlyle contemns. He sends the laggard 
euphuist back to actual life, and bids him forget 
himself and his fine words in some practical task. 
/'There is endless hope in work." "'Tools and 
the Man ' — that, henceforth to all time, is now 
our Epic." " Do the Duty which lies nearest thee." 
In these principles and precepts, Carlyle reveals a 



58 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 

practical, ethical interest not to be found in such 
purely Eomantic prose-writers as Lamb, Hazlitt, 
and De Quinceyj and by virtue of this new and 
decisive interest he belongs to the later or post- 
Eomantic age. He is not primarily an imaginative 
artist, not a mere dreamer ; he insists that dreams 
be realized in the hard, unmalleable stuff of life. 
His "Heroes" are simply the workers who thus 
victoriously embody their dreams in solid fact. 
Mahomet, Dante, Luther, Cromwell, — they all saw 
beyond the conventional shows of things; they 
were all seers or dreamers; but they were also 
more than dreamers, and triumphantly brought 
their dreams to pass in some portion or other of the 
recalcitrant material of daily life. Carlyle's Hero 
is the Deformed Eomanticist Transformed into a 
heroic worker of results. His last word to beauti- 
fully complaining visionaries is a charge that they 
immerse themselves in the Actual: "Yes here, in 
this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, 
wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere 
is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, 
believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thy- 
self, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Con- 
dition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same 
Ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of 
this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be 
heroic, be poetic ? " 

On the need, then, of a synthesis between the 
Actual and the Ideal, Carlyle insists with much 



THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 59 

gorgeous rhetoric. But if lie be asked for definite 
and close suggestions about this synthesis, his 
answers are apt to be vague or even impatient. 
"Let not any Parliament Member ask of this 
Editor, What is to be done? . . . Editors are not 
here, foremost of all, to say How. ... An Ed- 
itor's stipulated work is to apprise thee that it must 
be done. The 'way to do it '' — is to try it, know- 
ing that thou shalt die if it be not done." This is 
both ungracious and tantalizingly elusive. But its 
vagueness is characteristic of the whole post-Ro- 
mantic attitude toward conventional life. After 
all, the post-Eomanticists were not passionately 
enough in love with the Actual to follow out its 
facts and their laws with patient fidelity through 
all their complications and variations. They saw 
life and they loved life in its large contours, in its 
pageantry, under its more moving and more typical 
aspects. They lacked the microscopic eye and the 
ingenious instinct for detail that are characteristic 
of the modern artist and of the modern commen- 
tator on life. It remained for the scientific spirit 
with its fine loyalty to fact, and for realism with 
its delicate sense of the worth of the passing 
moment — of the phase — to carry still further 
the return to the regions of the Actual. 



TENNYSON'S RELATION TO 
COMMON LIFE 

Tennyson's poetry passes decisively beyond that 
of Clough, Mrs. Browning, and Matthew Arnold in 
its reaction against Eomanticism. Earlier than any 
of these poets Tennyson recognized in verse the 
dangers of lonely Eomantic dreaming. The Palace 
of Artj first published in 1833, portrays in richly 
ornate allegory the mental and moral disasters that 
are apt to overtake the dilettante who isolates him- 
self from his fellows in the pursuit of beauty. It 
seems almost a prophecy of what later befell Dante 
Gabriel Eossetti and a poetical diagnosis of his 
morbidness and maladies. It may justly be taken 
as expressing once for all Tennyson's unswerving 
conviction that an artist, in order both to preserve 
his normality and to give his art its widest scope 
and most vital power, must keep in close sympathy 
with the common life of his time. The recluse 
dreamer that Tennyson portrays in the poem is the 
typical Eomantic Wanderer, fallen heir to a fortune 
and endowed with a sense of ways and means. He 
builds his soul a lordly pleasure-house, gathers into 
it all forms and objects of art that may minister to 
60 



TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 61 

a nobly passionate search for visionary beauty, and 
devotes himself in the midst of these new and 
exquisitely directed conditions to the old Eomantic 
quest after the ideal. But, as every one remem- 
bers, bad dreams force themselves upon him 
through all his safeguards and mar the calculated 
perfection of his visionary world; he is tortured 
with strange fancies ; he feels the bonds of 
saue self-possession dissolving; the universe seems 
closing in upon him impalpably and terribly, — 
destroying with its threats the tranquil and har- 
monious movement of his imaginative life. And 
so he at last abandons his many-chambered palace 
of dreams, and goes down to make his abode in " a 
cottage in the vale,'' where he may draw solace 
and strength from " the common heart and need." 
To Tennyson, isolated dreaming, even though one. 
yield to it under the most exquisite and least sen- 
suous conditions, seems bound to prove futile and 
disastrous. 

But though Tennyson thus early and deci- 
sively condemned the waywardness and the re- 
moteness of Eomanticism, his own manner of life 
was curiously unaccordant. He was himself less 
reconciled with the conventionalities, less at home 
in the world of sheer fact, than perhaps any other 
great poet of his day. From first to last, in his 
relations with his fellow men, he was wilful, 
almost grotesque, in his maintenance of the pose of 
the special soul. In bearing, dress, and manner he 



62 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 

■was singular, picturesque, irreducible to rule. He 
wore all the forms of life with a somewhat chal- 
lenging difference. He had none of Browning's 
frank interest in the routine of society ; he guarded 
for himself a kind of splendid privacy ; he shut 
himself away from the dulness or the clamour of 
commonplace life in the beautiful wood-girdled 
fastness of Farringford, or in the heart of the 
heather in the Surrey hills at Aldworth. Of course, 
the whole world knows the greatness of the man, 
his flawless sincerity, and the scope and largeness 
of his nature ; there was in him no strain of little- 
ness, no taint of affectation. And so the slight, but 
persistent, strangeness of his movement among his 
fellows must be accepted as the genuine and neces- 
sary expression of peculiarities of temperament, 
which made it impossible for him to conventionalize 
himself without harming what was quintessential 
in his nature. 

Throughout Tennyson's art there run traces of 
this same inconsistency between theory and prac-. 
tice. Theoretically, he was convinced of the im- 
perative need of a synthesis between the actual 
and the ideal, and of the incontrovertible claims 
of commonplace life and the conventional world of 
organized society. Law, order, cooperative effort, 
— these conceptions are in his verse everywhere 
exalted. The individual is tutored into subjection 
to the rights of the body politic. Wellington and 
King Arthur — his typical heroes — are men whose 



TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 63 

natures are through and through wrought into obe- 
dience to law. The ideal of the State calls forth 
Tennyson's passionate devotion, and often stirs 
his imagination into the creation of fervent beauty. 
He is conspicuously patriotic, and is indeed almost 
insular in his keen loyalty to English traditions, 
English habits of life, English religious ideas, 
English landscapes, and the British Constitution. 
Under this Constitution, he finds reconciled as 
nowhere else, passion for individual freedom and 
reverence for order, and he celebrates the Consti- 
tution as the symbol of the marvellous English 
genius for self-government ; he finds treasured up 
in it the results of long generations of strenuous, 
but controlled, effort after more perfect social adjust- 
ment. He sings of England as, 

" A land of settled government, 
A land of just and old renown, 
Where Freedom slowly broadens down 
From precedent to precedent." 

Tennyson's fervid patriotism and his ardent ex- 
altation of order distinguish him from most of 
the great poets of the century : from the rebels, 
Byron and Shelley, whose tirades against English 
tyranny were notoriously fierce; and also from 
Clough and Arnold, whose love of country was 
tempered with much philosophic doubt. 

In his relations to science, too, Tennyson is far 
more modern than Clough or Arnold j here also he 



64 TENNYSON'S KELATION TO COMMON LIFE 

shows an increased closeness to fact and a striving 
to reconcile, at least theoretically, the world of 
fact with the world of dreams. The purpose of In 
Memoriam is, of course, from first to last to brings 
about this reconciliation. The poem sets itself to 
envisage unflinchingly under all its aspects the 
commonest and ugliest fact of human existence — 
death. It keeps continually in view the most 
discouraging conclusions that the scientific intel- 
lect urges about man's base origin, about nature's 
indifference to man's destiny, and about the in- 
significance of the human drama as a part of the 
great cosmic process. Yet the poet wins to beauty 
through all this adversity ; he brings sweetness out 
of the bitterness of death ; he convinces at least the 
heart that the grief and the tragedy of actual life 
are not absolute evil. 

In such poems as these, then, and in such ways 
as these, — through insistence by means of pictur- 
esque symbols on the intimate relation of art to life 
and through a lyrical outpouring of personal con- 
viction as regards the worth of life, — Tennyson at- 
tempts a reconciliation of the actual with the ideal. 
In so far he has got the better of the detachment 
that is characteristic of Romantic poetry. 

But when we go beyond his theories of life and 
his lyrical poems, and question how far he can veri- 
tably lay hold of the world of everyday experience 
and reproduce it in his art visibly and audibly, so 
that it shall have perfect truth of detail and yet 



TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 65 

a redeeming glamour, then we become aware of 
the limitations of his genius, and are once more 
troubled by that shrinking from the commonplace 
and from the crude, and by that monopolizing, in- 
terest in subjective emotion, which have already 
been noted as characteristic of him as a man. 
With the actual drama of human life Tennyson 
cannot cope; he cannot redeem its triviality; he 
cannot bring beauty out of its turmoil and confu- 
sion ; he cannot interpret into fine significance its 
puzzling complexities of motive, character, and 
passionate action. He cannot vanquish the repel- 
lent imperfections and defects of actual experience, 
and show, in the unwrought dross and tortured 
material of commonplace existence, God in the 
making; he cannot reveal God in the passing 
hours. For this kind of renovating imaginative 
realism he lacks courage ; he lacks also the neces- 
sary frank hospitality toward all kinds of experit, 
ence, the quick insight into motive and character, 
and the wide and close familiarity with the drama 
of life. 

External nature he can reproduce with what 
seems like truth and yet with beauty, for here he 
can be selective and subjective. But when he 
uses these same capricious methods for the treat- 
ment of character and conduct, his poetry comes 
perilously near taking on Eomantic falseness of 
tone and substance;, and it is this falsification of 
actual life that is meant when Tennyson is spoken 



66 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 

of as still under the sway of Romantic moods, as 
still using Eomantic methods. 

In considering these limitations of Tennyson's 
genius as affecting his relation to actual life, the 
Idylls of the King and other narrative poems that 
deal with legendary subjects may at once be set 
aside. In such poems Tennyson confessedly gives 
himself over to remote and beautiful dreaming. 
The dramas, too, may be neglected; these are by 
universal consent unreal, unconvincing, lyrically 
beautiful, but weak in characterization and untrue. 
There remain two classes of poems that profess to 
treat common and contemporary life sincerely and 
yet imaginatively : first, poems that may be called 
Idylls of Eustic Life, such poems as Dora and 
the Gardener^ s Daughter; here, too, belongs Enoch 
Arden: secondly, poems that take their subjects 
and characters direct from the artificial world of 
conventional society; the most important of these 
poems are Locksley Hall and the monodrama, Maud. 

Tennyson's relation to actual life in poems of 
the first class may be illustrated from Enoch Arden. 
Walter Bagehot has in one of his essays briefly 
pointed out how remote this poem continually keeps 
from the world of fact. Never for a moment in 
Enoch Arden is the reader brought into touch with 
real characters or with the real experiences of 
sailors. What the poem does is to put before the 
reader with exquisite deftness what such characters 
and such experiences become as they pass through 



TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 67 

the dreamy mind and before the visionary imagi- 
nation of the poet who wrote the Lady of Shalott 
and Tears, idle tears. The poem has none of the 
savour of fact. It is lyrically falsified from first 
to last — qualified into grace and music through the 
poet's refinement of temperament. An excellent 
illustration of this lyrical falsification is to be 
found in the description of Enoch on the desert 
island : — 

*• The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns 
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, 
The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, 
The lightning flash of insect and of bird, 
The lustre of the long convolvuluses 
That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran 
Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows 
And glories of the broad belt of the world, 
All these he saw ; but what he fain had seen 
He could not see, the kindly human face, 
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard 
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, 
The league-long roller thundering on the reef. 
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd 
And blossora'd in the zenith, or the sweep 
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave. 
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long 
Sat often in the seaward -gazing gorge, 
A shipwreck' d sailor, waiting for a sail : 
No sail from day to day, but every day 
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
Among the palms and ferns and precipices j 
The blaze upon the waters to the east ; 
The blaze upon his island overhead ; 
The blaze upon the waters to the west ; 
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 



68 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 

The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 
The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail." 



The splendour and the beauty of these lines, their 
imaginative power, are beyond cavil ; but what they 
really convey to us is Tennyson's lyrical comment 
on Enoch's isolation, not for a moment a vivid, vital 
sense of Enoch's own actual appreciation of his 
fate. Fancy Robinson Crusoe trying to find his 
mind mirrored in Tennyson's rhodomontade. 

There is no truth in the psychology of Enoch ; 
he is a sentimental, soft-hearted dreamer. There 
is no truth in the emotional atmosphere through 
which the background of minor characters and of 
nature is shown to us. The whole story is con- 
ceived in sentiment and brought forth in melodious 
lyricism. As a plea, therefore, for the essential 
worth of common life the poem has no constraining 
power. We feel persistently that the charm and 
the glamour come not from life itself, but from the 
temperament and the technique of the poet. We 
cannot be made in love with life by the delicate 
imagery and the musical cadences of this tale of 
self-sacrifice. There is no genuine synthesis of. 
the actual and the ideal ; for the poet shows no 
firm grasp on the actual. The sailor he describes 
is ansemic and semi-hysterical ; the refinements of 
the sailor's spiritual struggle are highly improb- 
able ; the returning wanderer would far more likely 
have conducted himself as Guy de Maupassant's 



TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 69 

seaman did in Le Retour. Finally, even if char- 
acters and incidents and atmosphere all seemed 
true, the poem would, nevertheless, because of the 
faint-heartedness of the sentiment, not be a success- 
ful renovation of life ; it would be more apt to give 
the reader a fit of the spleen than to send him out 
frankly and willingly into the world to take what 
it offers. 

When we turn to the second group of poems that 
portray actual life, we find Tennyson's Eomantic 
proclivities no less in evidence, although revealing 
themselves in a new fashion. In Maud, a typical 
poem of this class, the author's own personality 
less obviously interposes a false atmosphere be- 
tween the reader and actual life. But the falsifi- 
cation nevertheless exists, and Tennyson's inability 
to re-create the commonplace in terms of beauty 
shows itself as unmistakably as ever. The whole 
poem is the overwrought, half-frenzied dream of 
a mind diseased, — the mind of the hero, whose 
ideas and feelings and fancies make up the sub- 
stance of the poem, and through whose eyes and 
morbid temperament we are continually forced to 
look at whatever happens. This hero is the son of 
a suicide; he has a bias toward insanity; he has 
been all his days a lonely, myopic, inconsolable 
misanthrope; he inveighs much and often against 
the common lot and his own individual fate; he 
kills a man in a duel, — the brother of the woman he 
loves ; he is separated from his betrothed and goes 



70 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 

mad. Einally, a^ter suffering from various hallu- 
cinations, lie gets back his reason ; and he escapes 
from his private woe through going for a soldier. 

All this may be contemporary, but it certainly is 
not common life, and it certainly is morbid. The 
undeniable beauty of the poem is won through the 
help of a madman. To seem to Tennyson worth 
portrayal, the actual life of the present has to 
be edited in terms of the mind and the imagination 
of a monomaniac. Once more, then, Tennyson, 
though he professedly concerns himself with a 
subject drawn from the life around him, fails to 
bring about any satisfactory synthesis of the ideal 
and the actual. The piece of actual life that 
attracts his imagination is too unusual and strange 
to be representative; and the mode of portrayal, 
though true to the hero's temper, completely falsifies 
the values of normal existence. Moreover, the 
poem ends with a curious Eomantic flourish; the 
hero rushes off to fight for his country. Only in 
the pageantry and the excitement of war can he 
hope to forget his selfish passion and despair. 
The poem seems almost like a survival from the 
period of storm and stress. 

But besides the unreality of his narrative poems, 
there are several minor ways in which Tennyson's 
Eomantic discomfort in the presence of actual life 
shows itself. He is fond of allegory, and this fond- . 
ness is perhaps a sign of his powerlessness over the 
actual stuff of life, — of his inability to give us 



TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 71 

witli accuracy and yet with beauty the contours and 
the configurations and the rugged aspects of the 
world of fact. He likes to build his own cosmos 
of truth, instead of finding and revealing God's 
truth in God's cosmos. He delights in fashioning 
beautiful stories in which personified abstractions 
or simplified typical characters are the actors, and 
in which some theory or set of impressive ideas is 
symbolically illustrated. In the Palace of Art he 
demonstrates abstractly the dangers of dilettant- 
ism ; in the Vision of Sin he shows in a splendid 
and terrible pageant the pleasures and the pains 
of wickedness ; the Idylls of the King are through- 
out conceived and executed in accordance with 
an allegorical design. This instinct in an artist 
toward the region of allegorical abstractions is apt 
to go along with a shrinking dislike of the stark 
facts of actual life. The artist withdraws from 
the turmoil of the real universe into the fortress of 
his own mind, and beats the enemy in toy battles 
with toy soldiers. He demonstrates on maps and 
on paper that the devil must at last get the worst 
of it in the world. 

The same lack of control over concrete facts 
shows itself in the shallowness and vagueness of 
Tennyson's characterization. The men and the 
women in his lyrics and his narratives have no 
minutely realized individualities ; they are of inter- 
est to Tennyson because of the moods and the 
dreams they suggest to him; they do not tempt 



T2 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 

him into close analysis of their minds and hearts, of 
the peculiar interplay of their moods, motives, and 
acts ; indeed, as conceived by Tennyson they rarely 
have any complex inner life of thought and feeling. 
Sometimes they are types, — characters simplified 
for a moral purpose; sometimes, as in the Idylls, 
they are effective figures in romantic stories of love 
and war, and their acts flow directly and simply 
from elemental desires and passions, and express 
the somewhat conventional qualities of brave 
knights and fair ladies. But whatever the special 
value for Tennyson of the men and the women in 
his poems, they do not challenge him to subtle 
psychological studies, of the sort, for example, that 
Browning delights in. The actual facts of the 
inner lives of men and women have little interest 
or fascination for him; he cares hardly more for 
these inner facts than for the actual outward facts of 
everyday existence. His own moods and his own 
dreams are what he instinctively watches and inter- 
prets. Characters are worth while according to 
their power to excite rare moods of reverie and 
exquisite dreams. Tennyson is little better than a 
lotos-eater in his interpretation of character. 

Tennyson's curious self-involvement in the pres- 
ence of the personalities he watches or creates, his 
lack of vital dramatic sympathy and insight, are 
well illustrated in the series of poems that bear the 
names of women, — Lilian, Isabel, Madeline, Eled- 
nore, Adeline, and Margaret. About each of these 



TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 73 

fair women Tennyson " dreams deliciously " ; each 
is "made one with nature/' is portrayed through, 
beautiful symbols drawn from landscape and forest 
and hillside and " the blue regions of the air. " 
But what is portrayed? Not a mind and an in- 
tricate character, but a peculiar type of beauty 
(involving a temperament, to be sure), as the type 
plays luxuriously upon the moods and the imagina- 
tion of the poet. 

*' How may full-sail'd verse express, 
How may measured words adore 
The full-flowing harmony 
Of thy swan-like stateliness, 
Eleanore ? 
The luxuriant symmetry 
Of thy floating gracefulness, 
Eleanore ? 
Every turn and glance of thine, 
Every lineament divine, 

Eleanore, 

And the steady sunset glow. 

That stays upon thee ? " 

This is very beautiful, but it is certainly not 
psychology. Nor is there a subtler interpretation 
of character in Fatima, (Enone, and the two Mari- 
anas; they are merely studies of passion in terms 
of landscape. The picturesque aspects of charac- 
ter are what interest Tennyson, not the subtleties 
or the intricacies of mind and heart. This lack 
of psychological truth is only one more illustration 
of Tennyson's lack of instinct for the actual, — of 



74 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 

his remoteness from the common lot, — of his half- 
romantic subjectivity, — of his preoccupation with 
the dream or with his own moods. 

In all these ways, then, and for all these reasons, 
Tennyson fails of perfect imaginative control of 
common life, comes short of being a renovating 
interpreter of the commonplace. The truth of the 
matter is, that he had no vital faith in the common- 
place such as Browning had, or belief in its essen- 
tial worth. He was undemocratic in every fibre 
of his delicate recluse nature. He does his utmost 
in his art to be loyal to his age, to the wearisome 
tracts of the trivial in human life, even to the 
claims of the ugly and to the rights of pain and 
sin. He succeeds in theoretically justifying to 
himself all these repulsive elements in the uni- 
verse as part of some divinely guided process which 
shall ultimately lead to crowning good. The clos- 
ing lines of In Memoriam express the poet^s 
belief in 

" One far-off divine event 

To which the whole creation moves." 

Yet this very confession of faith is, after all, an 
illustration of Tennyson's distrust and dislike of 
the present. In the actual moment he is unable 
to find redeeming beauty or worth ; he can regard 
the passing moment, the welter of good and evil 
that he looks out upon, as worth while only as it 
may be atoned for by some far-away excellence to- 



TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 75 

ward whicli it is groping. The present lie tolerates 
simply as it contains the promise and potency 
of some remote future. This is merely, in a more 
refined form, the old Komantic blasphemy against 
life and the spirit that informs it. Greater faith, 
greater heartiness, more courage than this, are 
needed in a poet; otherwise he can hardly hope 
to portray a fragment of our actual fleeting life 
so as to make it seem divinely significant in spite 
of all its apparent triviality and its undeniable 
grossness and ugliness. 

Finally, even when Tennyson renders some piece 
of actual life exquisite in its appeal to us, the 
charm too often seems something adventitious, 
something artificially added to life, not resident in 
life and simply revealed by the poet. The beauty, 
for example, in Enoch Arden seems distilled into 
the story from the poet's temperament through the 
aid of musical rhythms and delicately wrought 
imagery. This is the old dubious method of 
Romanticism to which long ago Jeffrey and Peacock 
narrowly and unintelligently objected and in which 
later criticism has more precisely noted the eccen- 
tricity and untrustworthiness. Romantic poets — 
so the charge runs — give us their capricious 
moods about life ; they show us life with the em- 
bellishment imparted to it by their quaintly irides- 
cent temperaments. They give us a report, not of 
some actual region of fact, but of the mirage 
thereof cast against the heavens by the haze of 



76 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 

intense emotion in the midst of which they are 
perpetually moving and breathing. What they 
have to offer is news of the state of the emotional 
atmosphere, not news of the rugged earth. Their 
ideal is a visionary ideal in the clouds ; the actual 
remains below unredeemed. The beauty of the 
mirage, we come often to feel, is an artificial affair, 
the product of the refractions of personal feeling, 
of the individual horizon, of the evanescent lights 
and colours of poetic imagery, and of the shap- 
ing winds of rhythm. Beauty of this kind is worth 
while; yet it is in some degree accidental and 
abnormal ; it is in very truth only exquisite feign- 
ing. Tennyson in his imaginative treatment of 
actual life fails for the most part to create beauty 
more essential or permanent than this, or beauty 
that is more organically and necessarily related to 
common experience. He has still something of the 
visionary blindness of Romanticism when he tries 
to move about in the midst of the trivial incident 
and the varying turmoil of daily life. Out of what 
his vision has vouchsafed him, he creates lyrical 
poetry of irresistible sweetness and beauty. But 
his eye, while he has been watching the splendours 
of dreamland, has not learned the aspect or the 
meaning of the commonplace, and he makes his 
way uncertainly through a world that he only par- 
tially realizes. 



NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 

One of the most important effects of the Roman- 
tic movemenlf was the closeness of the relation it 
established between nature and the human soul. 
The intense and oftentimes eccentric emotions that 
tended to throw the Eomantic poet out of sympathy 
with his fellow men and with conventional life be- 
came the solvent of the rigid forms of the material 
universe. The poet's fervid mood proved the very 
fire necessary to fuse nature once and for all with 
emotion, to make it coalesce with thought and the 
inner life of man, and to unite matter and spirit 
more subtly and intimately than ever before. The 
Eomantic poets subdued nature to spirit; they in- 
terpreted nature in terms of human feeling ; they 
sent their imaginations out along countless lines of 
subtle association, drew all nature into sympathy 
with their intense experiences, and converted all 
the facts and forms of nature into "the passion- 
winged ministers of thought." Nature was no 
longer to stand apart from man as a system of half- 
hostile forces, or a mass of dry facts, meaningless 
except for science : it was not to be as for Pope and 
the Deists merely a great machine of infinitely 
ingenious construction, set running once and for all 
77 



78 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 

by tlie great Mechanician and for ever after grind- 
ing out effects unerringly and inevitably. For 
many Eomantic poets — notably for Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, and Shelley — nature was a direct emana- 
tion from the one great spiritual force which mani- 
fests itself also in the myriad individuals that make 
up the human race. The countless ideas and feel- 
ings that float through the mind of man and the 
countless shapes and aspects of the world of nature 
were alike the utterance of one great imaginative 
Artist, who expressed through these two sets of 
symbols his thoughts of beauty and truth. Hence 
the poet who seeks a proper image to stand for his 
thought has simply to let his imagination guide him 
through the beautiful forms of nature till he finds 
a fitting symbol ; his thoughts are God's thoughts, 
and have been already uttered in some fixed shape 
of beauty, or through some changing aspect, of 
the outside world. This is really the postulate 
on which Wordsworth's and Coleridge's theory 
of imagination depends; imagination, they urge 
leads to objective truth, while fancy only plays 
prettily with images ; imagination discerns essential 
analogies between mind and matter, and brings once 
more into at least transient unity the world of spirit 
and the world of nature. 

Tennyson's poetry carries on with fine loyalty 
and in some ways with increased effectiveness the 
Romantic tradition in the treatment of nature. Not 
that he accepts or expresses extreme transcendental 



NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 83 

impressions of youth ; there rests on all of them the 
light of early morning. The Lotos-Eaters portrays 
a series of scenes from the land where " it seemed 
always afternoon " ; the poem is a study in yellow 
and gold and orange; the landscapes are seen 
through a dreamy mellow haze and in the light of a 
westering sun ; and not one of them could be con- 
ceived of as occurring in the Ode to Memory, Nor 
could the following landscape be found by any 
possibility in the Lotos-Eaters : — 

" Pour round my ears the livelong bleat 
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds, 

Upon the ridged wolds, 
When the first matin-song hath waken'd loud 
Over the dark dewy earth forlorn, 
What time the amber morn 
Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud.'* 

There breathe through these lines the sense of mys- 
tery and the awe and yet the hope and the keen 
delight that are stirred in the heart of an impres- 
sionable boy by the sights and sounds of dawn. 
The Lotos-Eaters knew no such nature as this. 

Nor is it only in Tennyson's early or short poems 
that this atmospheric treatment of landscape is to 
be found. His later long narrative poems are full of 
equally good illustrations of his power to re-create 
nature in terms of a dominating mood. The action 
of these poems goes on in the midst of natural 
scenery which is perpetually varying in tone and 
colour, and light and shade, in sympathy with the 



84 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 

mood of the moment. In Maud, this suffusion of 
nature with passion is especially noticeable ; and 
the hysterics and bad psychology of that poem are 
made endurable by the beauty of such imaginative 
sketches as the following : — 

"I heard no sound where I stood 
But the rivulet on from the lawn 
Running down to my own dark wood ; 
Or the voice of the long sea-wave as it swell'd 
Now and then in the dim -gray dawn ; 
But I look'd, and round, all round the house I beheld 
The death-white curtain drawn ; 
Felt a horror over me creep, 
Prickle my skin and catch my breath, 
Knew that the death-white curtain meant but sleep, 
Yet I shudder' d and thought like a fool of the sleep of 
death." 

This should be compared with Wordsworth's 
" Strange fits of passion have I known " ; the mood 
is substantially the same ; but Tennyson's lines are 
far finer in phrasing, more suggestive in imagery, 
and more thoroughly atmospheric. 

In Enoch Arden, too, there are many passages 
where, with like intensity and imaginative power, 
nature is subdued to the passion of the moment. - 
What could be finer from this point of view or more 
inappropriate from the point of view of Enoch's 
psychology than the famous lines describing 
Enoch's sense of isolation on the desert island ? — 

" No sail from day to day, but every day 
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 



NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 85 

Among the palms and ferns and precipices ; 

The blaze upon the waters to the east ; 

The blaze upon his island overhead ; 

The blaze upon the waters to the west ; 

Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 

The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 

The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail." 

In order to bring out more unmistakably the 
peculiar transformation to wMch. in such descrip- 
tions as these nature submits in passing through 
Tennyson's temperament, it may be well to quote 
two or three of his simpler descriptions of natural 
scenery where he merely portrays frankly and 
delicately some clearly visualized aspect or object 
of the outside world. Descriptions of this sort also 
abound, and are wrought out with an exquisite fine- 
ness of detail that does not preclude breadth of 
treatment, and with marvellous felicity of phrase. 
The first of the following passages is from Margaret 
and the second from Maud : — 

*' The sun is just about to set, 
The arching limes are tall and shady, 
And faint, rainy lights are seen, 
Moving in the leavy beech." 

•* I was walking a mile, 
More than a mile from the shore, 
The sun look'd out with a smile 
Betwixt the cloud and the moor, 
And riding at set of day 
Over the dark moor land, 
Rapidly riding far away, 
She waved to me with her hand. 



86 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 

There were two at her side, 
Something flash' d in the sun, 
Down by the hill I saw them ride, 
In a moment they were gone." 

The lines from Margaret show as loving and faith- 
ful a study of nature as Wordsworth's, and as great 
delicacy of phrase in recording unusual or little 
noticed aspects of the outside world. The passage 
from Maud is a masterpiece of description; the 
landscape is sketched, in its broad features, with 
bold, free strokes, and the figures are flashed upon 
the reader's imagination by a gleam of light and a 
motion. In both these passages the treatment is 
sincere and simple ; nature is shown under a white 
light, with no modifying or harmonizing atmos- 
phere. But description of this kind, though attrac- 
tive enough in its way and bearing witness to the 
perfection of Tennyson's technique, lacks the specific 
charm and peculiar power of Romantic description ; 
it is not imaginative in the distinctively Romantic 
meaning of the term ; it does not, to use Lamb's 
words, " draw all things to one." In the passages 
earlier considered, the unifying and harmonizing 
power of imagination pervades every line, phrase, 
and word, and makes them all eloquent of a single 
thought and mood. This action of imagination is 
compared by Wordsworth in a famous passage of 
the last book of the Prelude, to the light of the 
moon as this light is seen, from the summit of a 
lofty hill, falling on a widespread landscape, and 



NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 87 

blending all the infinitely various details into a sin- 
gle harmonious impression of splendour and power. 
Such Romantic imagination in dealing with nature 
Tennyson possessed in a high degree ; and indeed, 
from one point of view, he may be said simply to 
have carried on to richer conclusions the work 
which the Romanticists began. As has already 
been suggested, he has probably been more influen- 
tial than even Wordsworth, in conveying widely 
and permanently into the English temperament a 
delicate and swiftly responsive sensitiveness to the 
emotional suggestiveness of nature. Wordsworth 
was, in large measure, preoccupied with the moral 
meaning of the external world ; to quote his own 
words, he sought "to exhibit the most ordinary 
appearances of the material universe under moral 
relations." Tennyson subdues nature still further 
and makes it eloquent of all our moods and passions. 
Wordsworth's moods are comparatively limited in 
variety and in subtlety; their very grandeur and 
their lofty elevation, when Wordsworth is at his 
best, prevent great refinement or great subtlety of 
feeling. His temperament is too simple, and his 
nature has too great mass, to admit of complex 
combinations of feelings or of quick and ravishing 
changes. "Admiration, love, and awe," these are 
the moods Wordsworth most insists on ; and in the 
service of these cogent but comparatively simple 
feelings he is fondest of interpreting the great world 
of nature. Tennyson's moods, on the other hand, 



88 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 

run through a very wide range and shade into each 
other through an infinite series of gradations. He 
plays on an instrument of far greater delicacy of 
adjustment and of much greater variety of tone- 
colour. He was heir to all the rich emotional life of 
the Komantic poets, and received by way of artistic 
inheritance a temperament already sensitive to a 
thousand influences that would have left the men 
of an earlier century unmoved ; and to these inher- 
ited aptitudes for feeling subtly and richly were 
added all the half-tones and minor gradations of 
feeling that the intense spiritual and intellectual 
life of the post-Eomantic period tended to develop. 
With this exquisitely sensitive temperament, he 
looked on the outside world and found everywhere 
correspondences between his moods and the aspects^ 
of nature. To catch and interpret, in all its range 
and subtlety and evanescent beauty, this emotional 
suggestiveness of nature was Tennyson's task, just 
as Wordsworth's task was to catch and register 
its moral and spiritual suggestiveness. Tennyson's, 
poetry, then, may be regarded as in a very special 
sense, a continuation of the Wordsworthian tra- 
dition, and as carrying still further that subdual 
of nature to the needs of man's spirit that Words- 
worth wrought at so faithfully. 

The variety and the subtlety of Tennyson's 
moods are most noticeable when we turn from his 
treatment of landscape to his use of natural sights 
and sounds as symbols. It is, of course, only by 



NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 89 

the use of these symbols that he could hope to sug- 
gest the thousand and one changes of mood he tried 
to portray. These evanescent moods have no 
names ; there are no conventional signs that the poet 
can use to place them before his readers ; hence for 
each mood he must find some natural equivalent — 
sor^ symbol that shall stand in its place, and, by 
touching secret springs in our minds and hearts, 
evoke the subtle complex of feeling he aims to sug- 
gest. These equivalents and symbols Tennyson 
finds chiefly in nature ; and his use of them is the 
last means to be noted by which he brings about a 
closer union between matter and spirit. 

This symbolical use of nature, together with its 
effect in giving a spiritual meaning to the world of 
the senses, is well illustrated in the lyric, " Tears, 
idle tears." The mood that the thought of the past 
calls up is highly complex — a resultant of many 
strangely blending elements; and the poet uses a 
series of sensuous images, a series of natural sights 
and sounds, to suggest the elementary feelings that 
enter into this mood. The " freshness " of delight 
with which the past is for a moment restored, 
the infinite " sadness " with which its irrevocable- 
ness forces itself once more on the thought, the 
"strangeness" of the far-away dim regions of 
memory, — these are the notes of feeling that go to 
make up the whole rich chord of the mood; and 
each has as its symbol, to call it into being, an 
image from nature : — 



90 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 

" Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, 
That brings our friends up from the under-world, 
Sad as the last which reddens over one 
That sinks with all we love below the verge ; 
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 

*' Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds 
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ; 
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more." 

Eacli of the images in these verses is a symbol 
charged with feeling. And not only does the series 
of symbols serve to suggest at the moment of read- 
ing the precise mood of the poet, but always there- 
after a reddening sail at sunset and the song of 
birds at dawn mean something more to us than 
they meant before Tennyson used them as symbols. 
Nature has taken on a whole new range of spiritual 
associations. 

There are later poets who have surpassed Tenny- 
son in variety and complexity of mood and in sug- 
gestiveness and subtlety of symbolic phrasing. In 
both these respects Dante Gabriel Kossetti was 
probably Tennyson's superior. But his superiority 
was gained at great cost. Nature, in his poetry, is 
broken up into a mere collection of symbolic sights 
and sounds ; we miss the breadth of treatment and 
the fine open-air quality of Tennyson's work ; there 
is often a sense of artificiality, of exaggeration, 
almost of violence done to nature to force her into 
the service of the poet's moods. Moreover, the 



NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 91 

variety and the subtlety of Kossetti's moods are 
gained at a like cost. Delight in moods became 
with Kossetti moodiness, and the study of moods 
reached the point of morbid introspection: subjec- 
tivity became a disease. 

Tennyson, then, resembles the Romantic poets in 
his lack of sympathy with real life. He lived in a 
dream-world rather than in the world of real men 
and real women ; and it is this dream-world, with 
its iridescence of beauty and its simplified and 
intensified characters, that he portrays for us in his 
poetry ,\save where he shows us the distorted pic- 
tures of life to be found in the minds of men half- 
mad with disappointed passion. His impatience of 
conventional life, his lack of interest in concrete 
character, and his intense subjectivity mark him 
out as akin to the Romantic poets, and as not 
having passed so decisively beyond the Romantic 
point of view and the Romantic mood as Browning, 
for example, passed beyond them. He was like 
the Romantic poets, too, in the fact that it was 
to nature that he turned to find escape from the 
crude actualities of everyday life; and it is prob- 
ably through his share in the great Romantic work 
of spiritualizing nature that he will be most en- 
duringly influential. 



HAWTHORNE 

It used to be the fashion a generation ago to 
have much to say about the morbidness of the life 
that Hawthorne's stories portray. But of late 
years the decadents have been in their romances so 
ingeniously busy with disease and death that to 
turn back to Hawthorne seems like returning to 
nature — to what is normal and healthy and sana- 
tive. It may, indeed, be true that Hawthorne had 
a hypertrophied conscience, and that the portrayal 
of life seemed to him chiefly worth while because 
it gave him a chance to indulge that conscience in 
its somewhat morbid desire to be troublesome. 
But, after all, to have an overanxious conscience is 
a more human state of affairs than to have, as is so 
often true of the decadents, no conscience at all, or 
to have one only to the end that clever defiance of 
it may lead to finely calculated discords in the 
music of art. Just here lies the difference between 
the novels of Hawthorne and the stories that mod- 
ern decadence is so liberal with. In both forms of 
art, sin, disease, death, the grisliest facts of human 
destiny are perpetually in evidence; but Haw- 
thorne is sincere in dealing with them, and meas- 
92 



HAWTHORNE ^ S3 



ures their results and computes their meaning in 
terms of normal life and the conventional moral 
consciousness, whereas modern decadents are pri- 
marily concerned to juggle out of the evil facts of 
life and their impact on our moral nature some 
new fantastic artistic effect, and care not a doit for 
the ethical point of view. , 

It is amusing to find Hawthorne now and then 
having an inkling of the existence of the primrose 
path of decadence, or coquetting with the notion of 
irresponsibility. In the Blithedale Romance he 
seems nearest to defying his conscience and being 
recklessly studious of artistic effects for their own 
dear sakes. Miles Coverdale, who tells the story, 
is, as he assures us, " a devoted epicure of his own 
emotions." In one place, after describing a mood 
in which " the actual world '^ was robbed for him 
" of its solidity," Coverdale tells us, in a self-satis- 
fied way, that he " resolved to pause and enjoy the 
moral sillabub" of the mood "until it was quite 
dissolved away." In another place he confesses to 
the habit of observing and analyzing from a dis- 
tance the characters of his fellows, and he is evi- 
dently somewhat proud of his speculative and half- 
cynical detachment. "It is not, I apprehend, a 
healthy kind of mental occupation," he declares, 
with apparently a pleasant sense of abnormality, 
" to devote one's self too exclusively to the study 
of individual men and women." Yet despite a few 
such superficial symptoms of dilettantism, Coverdale 



94 ' HAWTHORNE 

has a very respectable conscience, which insinuates 
its vigorous prejudices into his interpretation of the 
lives and actions he is observing and reporting. 

What is true of Coverdale is true in a yet 
higher degree of Hawthorne's other characters; 
sooner or later they all become acutely aware of 
having fostered or violated a Puritan conscience — 
with the possible exception of Zenobia ; and on her, 
poor woman! Hawthorne, while he portrays her, 
keeps fixed a kind of evil eye, which ultimately 
drives her into suicide as the only fitting expiation 
for her venturesome originality. As for Donatello, 
in the Marble Faun, who is at the start ostensibly 
the very type of unmoral humanity, he is, despite 
all his flourish of animality, never anything else 
than a thoroughly well-tamed creature, fit to caper 
in a lady's chamber. His wildness is a hothouse 
wildness, a studio wildness, a manipulated, care- 
fully fostered wildness, that is useful only for pur- 
poses of ornament and demonstration. When one 
really contemplates Donatello in the light of mod- 
ern science, there is something curiously grotesque 
in trying to regard Hawthorne's Faun as the Miss- 
ing Link or as Primeval Man before he evolved a 
conscience. There is more of outdoors in one verse 
of Walt Whitman's than in all Hawthorne's pages 
about Donatello. •? 

No ; the simple truth is that Hawthorne is in all 
his romances normal in spite of himself, and per- 
sistently moral and ethical in his interests despite 



HAWTHORNE 95 

his constitutional nnsociability, his contempt for 
conventions, and his overweening imaginativeness. 
He is ruled by his Puritan ancestors, and in his 
most fantastic individual dreams is loyal to inher- 
ited moral prejudices. His earnestness of purpose 
and his unfailing moral scrupulousness give to his 
dream-world and its shadowy populace a genuine- 
ness and cogency which the art of the decadents, 
dealing as it does in many of the same motifs^ 
never rivals. 

Still, it remains true that not more with Haw- 
thorne than with the decadents are we in the 
actual world of every day. Hawthorne is a 
dreamer who " dreams true,''^ but who, nevertheless, 
merely dreams, and whose world has the delicate 
intangibility of all dream-worlds. We never 
escape, in reading Hawthorne's romances, from the 
temperament of the author, and from his unobtru- 
sive but persistent imaginative control. He 
creates for a purpose, and in each romance he sub- 
dues to this purpose the background, the incident, 
the plot, the characters, and even the imagery and 
phrasing. The thoroughness with which his gene- 
rating purpose runs through every detail and word 
of a romance, and fashions and tempers and unifies 
all to a single predetermined end, is one of the 
most convincing proofs of Hawthorne's power as 
an imaginative artist. There is no piecemeal 
working in Hawthorne — none of the haphazard 
procedure that takes details and suggestions good- 



96 HAWTHORNE 

naturedly as chance offers them and weaves them 
dextrously, as Thackeray, for example, is wont to 
do, into a motley web of fiction. Each of Haw- 
thorne's long romances is a perfectly wrought work 
of art, wherein every part is nicely aware of all the 
rest and of the central purpose and total effect. 

Hawthorne is a master spinner of beautiful webs, 
and the most rabid devotee of art for art's sake can- 
not well refuse to enjoy the fineness and consist- 
ency of his designs, the continuity and firmness of 
his texture, and the richness and depth of his tint- 
ing. The pattern, to be sure, always contains a 
moral for apt pupils. But though Hawthorne 
dreams in terms of the ten commandments, he 
dreams beauty none the less ; and, indeed, for some 
of us who still believe that life is greater than art, 
his dreams are all the more fascinating artistically 
because they are deeply, darkly, beautifully true. 
Dreaming, that in all its wayward caprice is deli- 
cately aware of the worth of the moral law and the 
rational bias at the heart of things, and pays a 
pretty respect to the categorical imperative and the 
principle of sufficient reason, seems after all to 
gain an intensity and force and persuasive beauty 
not otherwise to be won. 

In all his romances Hawthorne is more or less 
plainly in pursuit of some moral or spiritual truth. 
In the desire to illustrate such a truth is to be 
found the originating motive of each of his longer 
works. The Scarlet Letter is the Eomance of Expi- 



HAWTHORNE 97 

ation, done in deeply glowing colours against the 
dark, sullen background of the Puritan tempera- 
ment. The House of the Seven Gables is the Ro- 
mance of Heredity. The colours are gray and 
sombre, with some pretty fantastic detail in pale 
rose and green where Phoebe's tender girlishness or 
womanliness appears. The Marble Faun is the 
Romance of the Mystery of Evil. It is the most 
elaborate of all Hawthorne's stories, and as a work 
of art is nearer lacking unity of tone and design, 
because of the archaeological and landscape detail 
of which the author is so lavish. Yet even here 
the background, though elaborate, has propriety. 
The story deals in symbolic form with the deepest 
mystery of human destiny — the origin and the 
meaning of evil ; and the background for the action 
is Rome, the very stones of whose streets tell tales 
of the struggles toward good and toward evil of 
many races of men. Rome, with its long perspec- 
tives through a picturesque past, is the symbol of 
civilized man in all his history, from the far away 
origin of society down to latter-day love of anarchy. 
Against this background is depicted the symbolic 
fate of Donatello and Hilda and Miriam, as types 
of the human will in its relation to evil. 

For the analyst of novelists' methods there is a 
real delight to be won from noting how consistent 
Hawthorne is in constructing his stories. He 
works invariably just as he ought to work to suit 
the theorist's notions. Being a creator of allegor- 

H 



98 HAWTHORNE 

ical romances, lie ought to work from vvithin his 
own mind out toward the world of actual fact, for 
which world he should have a fine disdain. His 
main purpose should be the creation and illustra- 
tion of moral effects. In an essay on Hawthorne's 
Tales, Poe has very happily laid down the law for 
this kind of fiction : " A skilful literary artist has 
constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned 
his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but 
having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain 
unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then 
invents such incidents — he then combines such 
events — as may best aid him in establishing this 
preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence 
tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he 
has failed in his first step. In the whole composi- 
tion there should be no word written of which the 
tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre- 
established design." All these prescriptions, 
which, according to Poe, should govern the short 
tale, will be found duly observed in Hawthorne's 
long romances. In tale and romance Hawthorne's 
methods are nearly the same. His imagination, in 
its dreamy play over the records of the remote 
drama of life, has been fascinated by some one of 
its typical and oft-recurring aspects — the bitter- 
ness of the expiation of sin, the tragic oppression 
wherewith the vices and even the virtues of the 
past weigh down on the innocent present. Such a 
large aspect of life usually carries with it into the 



HAWTHORNE 99 

dark-chamber of Hawthorne's mind some typical 
man or woman whose character and fate incarnate 
for him, with picturesque detail, the special truths 
about life that for the time being preoccupy him. 
From these original elements, the action of the 
story and all subordinate detail gradually shape 
themselves forth and take shadowy form, never 
with the wish or the hope of bringing the reader 
close to some glaring piece of actual life, but 
always with the aim of enveloping him subduingly 
in an atmosphere of spiritual emotion, and of offer- 
ing him unobtrusively at every moment, in the acts, 
in the thoughts and feelings of the actors, in the 
byways and vistas of nature, in the very air that 
he breathes, hints and symbols of certain large 
truths about human life and human endeavour. 
The regions where the action takes place are often- 
est nameless ; they are in dreamland — " vaporous, 
unaccountable, forlorn of light ; " they are not veri- 
fiable as actual corners of the world-ball, unless 
they are already so instinct with romance as to be 
fit to conspire with the author's purpose and help 
on the moral necromancy. The people that inhabit 
this dream-world are " goblins of flesh and blood " ; 
they are spirited up before us out of an unknown 
past. Priscilla, Hawthorne assures us, seemed to 
have "fallen out of the clouds"; Miriam's past 
and even large parts of her present are tantaliz- 
ingly unverifiable. The gossip of those who sur- 
round the principal actors tends to veil them still 



1 00 HAWTHORNE 

more deftly in a dim cloud of strangeness, rather 
than to expound their personalities with scientific 
accuracy, as would happen in a modern realistic 
story. We never know thoroughly the details of 
the lives of Chillingworth or Donatello; we are 
kept in uncertainty about them through surmises 
and suspicions that run in the story from lip to lip. 
What is sure about such characters is their pursuit 
of a few symbolic purposes which serve to fit them 
unerringly into the large design of the fable. Don- 
atello is all the time busied with the process of 
getting a soul. Judge Pyncheon is bent on selfish 
triumph at all costs, in pursuit of hereditary 
schemes of aggrandizement. Dimmesdale writhes 
his way pallidly through the Scarlet Letter, — hand 
on heart, — the visible symbol of repentance. 
Neither in these characters nor in any others is 
there an attempt at thoroughness or minuteness of 
realization, or at any delicate complication of mo- 
tives or at scientific analysis. Hawthorne keeps 
his characterization carefully free from the intrica- 
cies of actual life, and preserves uncontaminate the 
large outlines and glowing colours of his simplified 
men and women. Even in speech the people of his 
stories are nicely unreal ; his workmen are choice 
in their English, and his children lisp out sen- 
tences that are prettily modelled. Here, as so often, 
Hawthorne cares nothing for crude fact. 

His world, too, is a world where symbols are as 
frequent as in the happy days before Newton, the 



HAWTHORNE 101 

arch-foe of symbols, unwove the rainbow. The 
main action itself of each romance is one great 
symbol, and it germinates persistently in minor 
symbols. Scarlet letters flash out unexpectedly, 
even on the face of the heavens ; the House of the 
Seven Gables visibly shadows Hepzibah, Clifford, 
and Phoebe with the evil influences of the past; 
Hilda's doves encircle her and her tower with sug- 
gestions of unsullied innocence. So, too, Haw- 
thorne's characters themselves have features or 
tricks of manner that mark them out as symbolic 
and as meaning more than meets the eye; Dona- 
tello's ears, Priscilla's tremulous, listening look, 
Dimmesdale's persistent clutching at his heart, 
tease the reader into a continuous sense of the 
haunted duplicity of the world in which Haw- 
thorne keeps him. In each of Hawthorne's ro- 
mances the world and its inhabitants echo and re- 
echo a single importunate thought. 

Of course, all this is very sadly removed from 
the kind of art that the realists of recent years 
have instructed us to delight in. No one of lit- 
erary experience can cheat himself into fancying 
as he reads Hawthorne that he is having to do 
with real men or women or treading the solid 
ground of fact. He is continually aware that the 
world he moves in has been tampered with. Nev- 
ertheless, Hawthorne's fiction is bound to remain 
for most readers — both for uncritical readers and 
for readers of cultivation and discernment, even 



102 HAWTHORNE 

for those of them who are completely familiar 
with the best work of the modern realists — a per- 
manent source of delight. And this is true for 
various reasons. The lover of skilful technique, 
whatever his theory of the ultimate aims of fiction, 
must relish the beauty of Hawthorne's workman- 
ship. No one can gainsay Hawthorne's skill of 
execution, the largeness and symmetry of his de- 
signs, his delicately sure manipulation of detail, 
the intelligence of his methods when his ends are 
once granted, the freedom and uninterruptedness 
of his draughting, and the perfect graduation of 
his tones. Then, too, his romances have an 
abiding source of charm, whatever the fluctuations 
of fashion, in the fineness and nobleness of the tem- 
perament in terms of which they make life over. 
Doubtless this temperament has its limitations. 
Hawthorne's conscience was a familiar spirit that 
would not be laid, and Hawthorne allowed himself 
to be driven to the almost invariable study of path- 
ological states of soul and the analysis of guilt and 
expiation, until a reader is tempted to exclaim that 
life for Hawthorne is seven-eighths conduct and 
the other eighth remorse. Still, through all this in- 
herited Puritanic gloom there runs continually an 
unsubduable love for human nature, which makes 
the world of Hawthorne's stories a hospitable 
region, and gives the reader a sense of well-being 
even in the midst of the misdeeds and repentances 
through which he makes his way. H'^. feels that 



HAWTHORNE 10^ 

he breathes a genuine atmosphere of human sym- 
pathy ; tenderness and love, all the elemental affec- 
tions that form the abidingly worthy substance of 
human nature, are generously active in Haw- 
thorne's men and women — his people are real 
enough for that; and, moreover, Hawthorne, the 
author, bears himself toward all the folk of his 
mimic drama with large-hearted charity and inde- 
fatigable faith in the essential rightness of the uni- 
verse. The romances are, to quote Hawthorne's 
own words, "true to the human heart," and the 
human heart, as Hawthorne interprets it, is a very 
lovable and love-disseminating organ. For their 
rich, strong humanity, Hawthorne's romances will 
long be gratefully read by all who either naively or 
instructedly believe life to be worth living. 

Sometimes one is tempted to regret that Haw- 
thorne did not oftener forego his artificial atmos- 
pheres and his elaborate symbolism, and deal sin- 
cerely and directly with the actual life of his day 
and generation. Poe urged this on Hawthorne, 
and took him roundly to task for following so in- 
veterately the high priori, allegorical way. In 
point of fact, Hawthorne has, in one or two of his 
Twice Told Tales, actually reproduced bits of the 
New England life that surrounded him — for exam- 
ple, in the sketch called the Apple-Dealer. More- 
over, he has portrayed very truly and delightfully, 
in the Introduction to the Scarlet Letter, the pre- 
cincts of the quaint custom-house of Salem, with 



104 HAWTHORNE 

its retinue of lackadaisical, sleepy officials. Yet it 
is to be noted that these subjects from actual life 
which he has treated sympathetically and convinc- 
ingly are all of the sort where life in its monot- 
ony and patience of trifles and dimness of detail 
almost passes over into the region of dreams. It 
may be doubted whether a more variegated life and 
more complex and brilliant characters would not 
have been beyond Hawthorne's power of truthful 
representation. He had in very fact something of 
the night in his disposition, and whatever he pre- 
vailingly portrays has either to have in its nature 
a suggestion of the discoloured temperateness of 
night, or else to be thinned away and modulated 
through his imagination until it has lost the gross- 
ness and actuality of fact and grown tenuous and 
pallid. 

In his causeries, where he professes to talk to the 
reader directly about the commonplace affairs of 
daily life, there is noticeable the same reduction of 
all things to the texture of a dream, the same dis- 
enthralment of the most prosaic objects and facts 
from the tyranny of material law and everyday 
aspect. We can fancy Hawthorne writing the 
weird tale of a man who found whatever he 
touched melt into an impalpable dream, and who 
was thus doomed to wander ever in a region of en- 
chanted, intangible forms. This man may typify 
Hawthorne himself ; only it must be noted that his 
dream-world has stability and truth and a welcome 



HAWTHORNE 105 

for us because of its faithfulness to the great laws 
of human nature, to the moral law, to the best feel- 
ings of good men and good women, and also be- 
cause of its exquisite consistency and the beauty of 
its fluent self-revelation. We dream uninterrupt- 
edly in accordance with certain essential needs of 
our natures, and we instinctively accept the dream 
without any jarring desire to compare it with 
crude fact. 

What oftenest disturbs the modern and exacting 
reader of Hawthorne, and rouses him unpleasantly 
from his dream, is Hawthorne's abuse of symbols. 
Now and then, Hawthorne's instinct fails him in 
making the nice distinction between art and arti- 
fice. In his creation of atmosphere and search for 
effect he is occasionally obvious and cheap, and 
seems to tamper needlessly with facts and with the 
laws of nature. The heat of the scarlet letter be- 
comes after a time oppressive ; the display of the 
A in the heavens, during the scene on the scaffold, 
seems merely a theatrical bid for a shiver. The 
shadow that is asserted always to have rested on 
Chillingworth, even in the sunshine, seems the 
result of a gratuitous juggling with the laws of 
light. Now and again, in such cases as these, Haw- 
thorne makes us aware that he is playing tricks on 
our souls. Matthew Arnold has quoted Sainte- 
Beuve as somewhere saying that every kind of art 
has its characteristic defect, and that the defect of 
Eomantic art is le faux. From this falseness 



106 HAWTHORNE 

Hawthorne keeps, on the whole, wonderfully free ; 
and yet at times he is betrayed into it. 

Ordinarily, with Komantic writers, artificiality 
comes from the exaggerated study of an effect that 
is purely artistic ; but with Hawthorne this is not 
so. His desire to point his moral is what misleads 
him — his monomaniac wish to find the heavens 
and the earth eloquent of the special truth that for 
the moment rules his imagination. This wish in 
one form or another pervades, as we have seen, all 
Hawthorne's fiction ; and as long as it acts silently 
and unobtrusively, like gravity or the law of chem- 
ical affinities, to bind Hawthorne's world harmoni- 
ously together and to make it a significant whole, 
its presence is not only unobjectionable, but is 
largely responsible for the cogency and impressive- 
ness of his art. But when this underlying moral 
impulse plays symbolic tricks with trifles, it de- 
generates from being a natural power into a kind 
of cheap legerdemain, and becomes little short of 
offensive. At such moments Hawthorne's absorb- 
ing preoccupation with a moral meaning and unstu- 
diousness of artistic effect, pure and simple, seem 
almost ludicrous to a modern reader who has been 
trained to delight in the skill with which sophisti- 
cated artists nowadays vanquish technical difficul- 
ties for their own sake and embody a mood or realize 
a situation with single-minded pleasure in their art 
and without moral malice prepense. At times, then, 
Hawthorne must impress us as naive in his devotion 



HAWTHORNE 107 

to fairly obvious moral truth ; and at times, too, lie 
seems naive in his ambitions. It would require 
great courage for any one nowadays to attempt to 
solve in a romance the mystery of the existence of 
evil. Occasionally, Hawthorne is naive in his 
enthusiasms, particularly in the Marble Faun. The 
descriptions of Rome and its works of art have some- 
thing of the exuberance of the first tour in Europe. 
The praise of Guido woos nowadays unsympathetic 
ears, and in general the discussions on art that the 
American colony in the Marble Faun solemnly en- 
gage in are quite sufficiently obvious and archaic. 
Finally, it miist be admitted that Hawthorne has 
never studied or portrayed sympathetically a man 
or woman of real intellectual quality ; he has never 
put before us a first-rate mind in perfect working 
order, nor anywhere traced out, subtly and convinc- 
ingly, the refinements of the intellectual life. It 
is not simply that he has never given us a genuine 
man of the world ; of course, his method and tem- 
perament alike forbade that. From the very nature 
of Hawthorne's art, a man of the world, had Haw- 
thorne tried to portray him, would have become a 
man out of the world. But why should not Haw- 
thorne have portrayed, at least once in a way, a 
thoroughly intellectual man or woman ? a man or 
woman whose mind was well disciplined, brilliant, 
and controlling ? Nowhere has he done this. His 
men, the moment they grow accomplished, drift 
into morbidness or villainy — hunt the philoso- 



108 HAWTHORNE 

pher's stone, become grotesque philanthropists, 
take to mesmerism or alchemy or unwise experi- 
ments in matrimony. Hawthorne's fiction seems 
really somewhat vitiated by Romantic distrust of 
scholarship, of mental acuteness, and of whatever 
savours of the pride of intellect. This bias in his 
nature must be borne in mind when one is consid- 
ering the shallowness and defectiveness of the indi- 
vidual characterization in his novels — a shallow- 
ness and defectiveness which, as has been noted, 
are involved in his essentially romantic conception 
of the art of fiction. 

Yet, when all these disturbing elements in our 
enjoyment of Hawthorne have been allowed for, 
there remains a vast fund of often almost unal- 
loyed delight to be won from his writings. More- 
over, this delight seems likely to increase rather 
than grow less. At present, Hawthorne is at a de- 
cided disadvantage, because, while remote enough 
to seem in trifles here and there archaic, he is yet 
not remote enough to escape contemporary stan- 
dards or to be read with imaginative historical 
allowances and sympathy, as Richardson or Defoe 
is read. Hawthorne's romances have the human 
quality and the artistic beauty that ensure survival ; 
and in a generation or two, when the limitations of 
the Romantic ideal and the scope of Romantic 
methods have become historically clear in all men's 
minds, Hawthorne's novels will be read with an 
even surer sense than exists to-day of that beauty 



HAWTHORNE 109 

of form and style and that tender humanity which 
come from the individuality of their author, and 
with a more tolerant comprehension of the imper- 
fectness of equipment and occasional faults of man- 
ner that were the result of his environment and 
age. 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 

PoE is a better poet in his prose than in his 
poetry. A reader of Poe's poetry, if he be quick 
to tal.e umbrage at artificiality and prone to Cttvii, 
feels, after a dozen poems, like attempting an in- 
ventory of Poe's literary workshop — the material 
Poe uses is so uniform and the objects he fashions 
are so few and inevitable. The inventory might 
run somewhat as follows: One plaster bust of 
Pallas slightly soiled; one many-wintered Eaven 
croaking Nevermore ; a parcel of decorative names 
— Auber, Yaanek, Zante, Israfel; a few robes of 
sorrow, a somewhat frayed funeral pall, and a 
coil of Conqueror Worms; finally, one beautiful 
lay figure whom the angels name indifferently 
Lenore, Ulalume, and Annabel Lee. Masterly as 
is Poe's use of this poetical outfit, subtle as are his 
cadences and his sequences of tone-colour, it is only 
rarely that he makes us forget the cleverness of his 
manipulation and wins us into accepting his moods 
and imagery with that unconscious and almost hyp- 
notic subjection to his will which the true poet 
secures from his readers. 

110 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 111 

In the best of his visionary Tales^ on the other 
hand, Poe is much more apt to have his way with 
us. He works with a far greater variety of appli- 
ances, which it is by no means easy to number and 
call by name ; the effects he aims at are manifold 
and not readily noted and classified; and the de- 
tails that his imagination elaborates come upon us 
with a tropical richness and apparent confusion 
that mimic well the splendid lawlessness and un- 
designedness of nature.- Moreover, even if the 
artifice in these tales were more palpable than it 
is, it would be less offensive than in poetry, in- 
asmuch as the standard of sincerity is in such per- 
formances confessedly less exacting. The likeness 
in aim and in effect between the tales and the 
poems, however, cannot be missed — between such 
tales as Ligeia and Eleonora and such poems as 
The Raven and Ulahcme. Mr. Leslie Stephen has 
somewhere spoken of De Quincey's impassioned 
prose as aiming to secure in unmeasured speech 
very many of the same effects that Keats's Odes 
produce in authentic verse. This holds true also 
of the best of Poe's romances; they are really 
prose-poems. And, indeed, Poe has himself recog- 
nized in his essay on Hawthorne the close kinship 
between tale and poem, assigning to the poem sub- 
jects in the treatment of which the creation of 
beauty is the ruling motive, and leaving to the 
prose tale the creation of all other single effects, 
such as horror, humour, and terror. Both poem and 



112 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

tale must be brief, absolutely unified, and must 
create a single overwhelming mood. 

The world that Poe's genuinely fantastic tales 
take us into has the burnish, the glow, the vision- 
ary radiance of the world of Eomantic poetry ; it is 
as luxuriantly unreal, too, as phantasmagoric — 
though it lacks the palpitating, buoyant loveliness 
of the nature that such poets as Shelley reveal, and 
is somewhat enamelled or metallic in its finish. Its 
glow and burnish come largely from the concrete- 
ness of Poe's imagination, from his inveterate fond- 
ness for sensations, for colour, for light, for luxuri- 
ant vividness of detail. Poe had the tingling senses 
of the genuine poet, senses that vibrated like deli- 
cate silver wire to every impact. He was an 
amateur of sensations and loved to lose himself in 
the Altitudo of a perfume or a musical note. He 
pored over his sensations and refined upon them, 
and felt to the core of his heart the peculiar thrill 
that darted from each. He had seventy times 
seven colours in his emotional rainbow, and was 
swift to fancy the evanescent hue of feeling that 
might spring from every sight or sound — from 
the brazen note, for example, of the clock in The 
Masque of the Bed Death, from " the slender stems " 
of the ebony and silver trees in Eleonora, or from the 
" large and luminous orbs " of Ligeia's eyes. Out 
of the vast mass of these vivid sensations — " pas- 
sion-winged ministers of thought'' — Poe shaped 
and fashioned the world in. which his romances 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 113 

confine us, a world that is, therefore, scintillating 
and burnished and vibrant, quite unlike the world 
in Hawthorne's tales, which is woven out of dusk 
and moonlight. 

Yet, curiously enough, this intense brilliancy of 
surface does not tend to exorcise mystery, strange- 
ness, terror from Poe's world, or to transfer his 
stories into the region of everyday fact. Poe is a 
conjurer who does not need to have the lights 
turned down. The effects that he is most prone 
to aim at are, of course, the shivers of awe, crisp- 
ings of the nerves, shuddering thrills that come 
from a sudden, overwhelming sense of something 
uncanny, abnormal, ghastly, lurking in the heart 
of life. And these nervous perturbations are even 
more powerfully excited by those of his stories that, 
like Eleonora and Ligeia, have a lustrous finish, 
than by sketches that, like Shadow and Silence, 
deal with twilight lands and half-visualized regions. 
In TJie Masque of the Red Death, in The Fall of the 
ffouse of Usher, and in A Descent into the Mael- 
strom, the details of incident and background flash 
themselves on our imaginations with almost painful 
distinctness. 

The terror in Poe's tales is not the terror of the 
child that cannot see in the dark, but the terror of 
diseased nerves and morbid imaginations, that see 
with dreadful visionary vividness and feel a mortal 
pang. Poe is a past master of the moods of dis- 
eased mental life, and in the interests of some one 



114 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

or other of these semi-hysterical moods '.aany of 
his most uncannily prevailing romances are written. 
They are prose-poems that realize for us such half- 
frenetic glimpses of the world as madmen have; 
and suggest in us for the moment the breathless, 
haggard mood of the victim of hallucinations. 

It must not, however, be forgotten that Poe wrote 
tales of ratiocination as well as romances of death. 
In his ability to turn out with equal skill stories 
bordering on madness and stories where intellec- 
tual analysis, shrewd induction, reasoning upon 
evidence, all the processes of typically sane mental 
life, are carried to the utmost pitch of precision 
and effectiveness, lies one of the apparent anomalies 
of Poe's genius and art. In The Murders in the 
Rue Morgue^ The Mystery of Marie RogH, and Tlie 
Purloined Letter, Poe seems sanity incarnate, pure 
mental energy untouched by moods or passions, 
weaving and unweaving syllogisms and tracking out 
acutely the subtlest play of thought. What in 
these stories has become of Poe the fancy-monger, 
the mimic maniac, the specialist in moodiness and 
abnormality ? 

After all, the difficulty here suggested is only 
superficial and yields speedily to a little careful 
analysis. We have not really to deal with a puz- 
zling case of double personality, with an author 
who at his pleasure plays at being Dr. Jekyll or 
Mr. Hyde. In all Poe's stories the same personality 
is at work, the same methods are followed, and the 



1 EDGAB ALLAN POE 115 

material used, tHough. at first siglit it may seem in 
the two classes of tales widely diverse, will also 
turn out to be quite the same, at any rate in its 
artificiality, in its remoteness from real complex 
human nature, and in its origin in the mind of the 
author. Certain instructions that in an essay on 
Hawthorne Poe has given to would-be writers of 
tales are delightfully serviceable to the anxious 
unraveller of the apparent contradictions in Poe's 
personality. 

To him who would fashion a successful short 
story, Poe prescribes as follows : He must first of 
all pick out an effect — it may be of horror, it may 
be of humour, it may be of terror — which his short 
story is to aim to produce, to impose vibratingly 
on the temperament of its readers. This effect is 
to give the law to the whole of the short story, to 
regulate its every detail, both of incident and char- 
acter, its background of nature or town, its texture 
of sensations, its imagery, phrasing, wording, tone, 
even the cadences of its sentences. The very first 
sentence must in some divining fashion prepare 
for this effect, and every bit of material that is 
used must help in the preparation, must be pre- 
monitory, must whet curiosity, must set the nerves 
nicely a-tremble, must make the reader more and 
more ready to fall a prey to the final catastrophe. 
In short, the tale, as Poe conceives it, is a marvel- 
lously ingenious set of devices for so tuning a sensi- 
tive temperament and giving it intensity of timbre 



116 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

that at just the right moment a special chord of 
music may be struck upon it with overwhelming 
power and richness of overtone and resonance. 
This formula applies alike to Poe's romances of 
death and to his tales of ratiocination; and one 
of the first suggestions it carries with it has to do 
with the artificiality of the material that Poe uses 
in all his fiction. Whether the effect that Poe 
aims at is a shiver of surprise at the sudden ingen- 
ious resolution of a riddle, or a shudder of horror 
at the collapse of a haunted house, his methods of 
work are substantially the same, and the stuff from 
which he weaves his tale is equally unreal and re- 
mote from what ordinary life has to offer ; it is all 
the product of an infinitely inventive intellect that 
devises and plans and adroitly arranges with an 
unflinching purpose to attain an effect. The better 
poetry, the more feigning ; and Poe is an excellent 
poet in these prose-poems. He can invent with 
endless ingenuity and plausibility, play-passions, 
play-moods, play-sensations, play-ideas, and play- 
complications of incident. He is an adept in fitting 
these mock images of life deftly together, in subtly 
arranging these simulacra of real feeling and real 
thought so that they shall have complete congru- 
ity, shall have the glamour and the momentary 
plausibility of truth, and shall rally together at 
the right moment in a perfect acclaim of music. 
But whether the tale deal professedly with abnor- 
mal life or with rational life, its seemliness and 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 117 

beauty and persuasive power come simply from 
Poe's immense cleverness as a constructive artist, 
as a technician, from his ability to play tunes on 
temperaments, not from his honest command of 
human life and character. In all that he does Poe 
is emotionally shallow but artistically, like Joey 
Bagstock, " devilish sly." 

The shallowness of Poe's treatment of life and 
character is almost too obvious to need illustration. 
Not only does he disdain, as Hawthorne disdains, 
to treat any individual character with minute real- 
istic detail, but he does not even portray typical 
characters in their large outlines, with a view to 
opening before us the permanent springs of human 
action or putting convincingly before us the radi- 
cal elements of human nature. The actors in his 
stories are all one-idea'd creatures, monomaniac 
victims of passion, or grief, or of some perverse 
instinct, or of an insane desire to guess riddles. 
They are magniloquent poseurs, who dine off their 
hearts in public, or else morbidly ingenious in- 
tellects for the solving of complicated problems. 
The worthy Nietzsche declares somewhere that the 
actors in Wagner's music-dramas are always just a 
dozen steps from the mad-house. We may say the 
same of Poe's characters, with the exception of 
those that are merely Babbage calculating ma- 
chines. Complex human characters, characters 
that are approximately true to the whole range 
of human motive and interest, Poe never gives 



118 EDGAR ALLAN FOE 

us. He conceives of characters merely as means 
for securing his artificial effects on the nerves of 
his readers. 

The world, too, into which Poe takes us, bur- 
nished as it is, vividly visualized as it is, is a 
counterfeit world, magnificently false like his char- 
acters. Sometimes it is a phantasmagoric world, 
full of romantic detail and sensuous splendour. Its 
bright meadows are luxuriant with asphodels, hya- 
cinths, and acanthuses, are watered with limpid 
rivers of silence that lose themselves shimmeringly 
in blue Da Vinci distances, are lighted by triple- 
tinted suns, and are finally shut in by the " golden 
walls of the universe." When not an exotic region 
of this sort, Poe's world is apt to be a dextrously 
contrived toy universe, full of trap-doors, unex- 
pected passages, and clever mechanical devices of 
all sorts, fit to help the conjurer in securing his 
effects. Elaborately artificial in some fashion or 
other, Poe's world is sure to be, designed with nice 
malice to control the reader's imagination and put 
it at Poe's mercy. In short, in all that he does, in 
the material that he uses, in the characters that he 
conjures up to carry on the action of his stories, 
in his methods of weaving together incident and 
description and situation and action, Poe is radi- 
cally artificial, a calculator of effects, a reckless 
scorner of fact and of literal truth. 

And, indeed, it is just this successful artificiality 
that for many very modern temperaments consti- 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 119 

tutes Poe's special charm ; he is thoroughly irre- 
sponsible ; he whistles the commonplace down the 
wind and forgets everything but his dream, its 
harmony, its strenuous flight, its splendour and 
power. The devotees of art for art's sake have 
now for many years kept up a tradition of un- 
stinted admiration for Poe. This has been spe- 
cially true in France, where, indeed, men of all 
schools have joined in doing him honour. Barbey 
d'Aurevilly wrote an eulogistic essay on him as 
early as 1853, an essay to which he has since from 
time to time made various additions, the last in 
1883. Baudelaire translated Poe's tales in several 
instalments between 1855 and 1865. !Emile Hen- 
nequin published, a few years ago, an elaborate 
study and life of Poe ; and Stephane Mallarme has 
of late conferred a new and perhaps somewhat du- 
bious immortality upon the Raven, through a trans- 
lation into very symbolistic prose. In truth, Poe 
was a decadent before the days of decadence, and 
he has the distinction of having been one of the 
earliest defiant practisers of art for art's sake. 
In his essay on the Poetic Principle, he expressly 
declared that a poem should be written solely " for 
the poem's sake," — a phrase which almost antici- 
pates the famous formula of modern sestheticism. 
The drift of this essay, Poe's opinion elsewhere 
recorded, and his practice as a story-teller, all agree 
in implying or urging that art is its own justifica- 
tion, that the sole aim of art is the creation of 



120 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

beauty, and that art and actual life need have 
nothing to do with one another. To be sure, Poe's 
comments on everyday life have not acquired quite 
the exquisite contempt and the epigrammatic finish 
characteristic of modern decadence; yet the root 
of the matter was in Poe — witness a letter in 
which he boasts of his insensibility to the charms 
of "temporal life," and of being "profoundly ex- 
cited " solely " by music and by some poems." 

Poe and his heroes curiously anticipate, in many 
respects, the morbid dreamers whom French novel- 
ists of the decadent school have of recent years re- 
peatedly studied, and of whom Huysmans's Des 
Esseintes may be taken as a type. The hero in The 
Fall of the House of Usher ^ with his "cadaverous- 
ness of complexion," his "eye large, liquid, and 
luminous beyond comparison," his "habitual trep- 
idancy," his "hollow-sounding enunciation," "his 
morbid acuteness of the senses," and his suffering 
when exposed to the odours of certain flowers and to 
all sounds save those of a few stringed instruments, 
might be a preliminary study for Huysmans's 
memorable Des Esseintes. Usher has not the 
French hero's sophistication and self-consciousness ; 
he suffers dumbly, and has not Des Esseintes's con- 
solation in knowing himself a "special soul," super- 
sensitive and delicate beyond the trite experience 
of nerves and senses prescribed by practical life. 
He does not carry on his morbid experimentations 
debonairly as does Des Esseintes, and he takes his 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 121 

diseases too S' 'riously. But he nevertheless antici- 
pates Des Esseintes astonishingly in looks, in nerves, 
in physique, and even in tricks of manner. Poe's 
heroes, too, are forerunners of modern decadents in 
their refinings upon sensation, in their fusion of the 
senses, and in their submergence in moods. As Herr 
Nordau says of the Symbolists, they have eyes in 
their ears; they see sounds; they smell colours. 
One of them hears rays of light that fall upon his 
retina. They are all extraordinarily alive to the 
"unconsidered trifles" of sensation. The man in 
the Pit and the Peyididum smells the odour of the 
sharp steel blade that swings past him. They de- 
tect with morbid delicacy of perception shades of 
feeling that give likeness to the most apparently 
diverse sensations. The lover in Ligeia feels in 
his "intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes" the same 
sentiment that at other times overmasters him "in 
the survey of a rapidly growing vine, in the con- 
templation of a moth, a butterfly, ... in the fall- 
ing of a meteor, ... in the glances of unusually 
aged people, ..." and when listening to "certain 
sounds from stringed instruments." Moods become 
absorbing and monopolizing in the lives of these 
vibrating temperaments. "Men have called me 
mad," the lover in Eleonora ingratiatingly assures 
us; "but the question is not yet settled whether 
madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence; 
whether much that is glorious, whether all that is 
profound, does not spring from disease of thought 




/ 



122 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

— from moods of mind exalted at t.ie expense of 
tlie general intellect." Finally, Poe's heroes antici- 
pate the heroes of modern decadence in feeling the 
delicate artistic challenge of sin and of evil : they 

yhardly reach the audacities of French Diabolism 
and Sadism; but at least they have the whim of 
doing or fancying moral evil that aesthetic good 
may come. 

]y All these characteristics of Poe's work may be 
summed up by saying that his heroes are apt to be 
I neuropaths or degenerates. And doubtless Poe 
himself was a degenerate, if one cares to use the 
somewhat outworn idiom of the evangelist of the 
Philistines. /He had the ego-mania of the degener- 
ate, a fact which shows itself strikingly in his art 
through his preoccupation with death. In his 
poetry and prose alike the fear of death as numbing 
the precious core of personality is an obsession with 
him, and such subjects as premature burial, metem- 
psychosis, revivification after death, the sensations 
that may go with the change from mortality to im- 
mortality (see the Colloquy of Monos and Una), 
had an irresistible fascination for him. # Moreover, 
throughout Poe's art there are signs of ego-mania 
in the almost entire lack of the social sympathies. 
Where in Poe's stories do we find portrayed the 
sweet and tender relationships and affections that 
make human life endurable ? Where are friendship 
and frank comradeship and the love of brothers and 
sisters and of parents and children? Where are 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 123 

the somewhat trite but after all so necessary virtues 
of loyalty, patriotism, courage, pity, charity, self- 
sacrifice? Such old-fashioned qualities and ca- 
pacities, the stuff out of which what is worth while 
in human nature has heretofore been wrought, 
are curiously unrecognized and unportrayed in 
Poe's fiction. They seem to have had no artistic 
meaning for him — these so obvious and common- 
place elements in man and life. Perhaps they 
simply seemed to him not the stuff that dreams are 
made of. 

When all is said, there is something a bit inhu- 
man in Poe, which, while at times it may give a 
special tinge to our pleasure in his art, occasionally 
vitiates or destroys that pleasure. His taste is not 
immaculate; he will go any length in search of a 
shudder. Sometimes he is fairly repulsive because 
of his callous recital of loathsome physical details, 
for example in his description of the decimated 
Brigadier-General, in Tlie Man that Was Used Up. 
In King Pest, TJie Premature Burial, and M. 
Valdemar, there is this same almost vulgar in- 
sensibility in the presence of the unclean and dis- 
gusting. At times, this callousness leads to artistic 
mischance, and causes a shudder of laughter where 
Poe wants a shiver of awe. Surely this is apt to 
be the case in Berenice, the story where the hero 
is fascinated by the beautiful teeth of the heroine, 
turns amateur dentist after her death, and in a 
frenzy of professional enthusiasm breaks open her 



124 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

coffin, and extracts her incisors, bicuspids, and 
molars, thirty-two altogether — the set was complete. 
When this inhumanity of Poe's does not lead to 
actual repulsiveness or to unintentional grotesque- 
ness, it is nevertheless responsible for a certain 
aridity and intellectual cruelty that in the last 
analysis will be found pervading pretty much all he 
has written. This is what Barbey d'Aurevilly has 
in mind when he speaks of Poe's secheresse, the 
terrible dryness of his art. And looking at the 
matter wholly apart from the question of ethics, 
this dryness is a most serious defect in Poe's work 
as an artist. His stories and characters have none 
of the buoyancy, the tender, elastic variableness, 
and the grace of living things; they are hard in 
finish, harsh in surface, mechanically inevitable in 
their working out. They seem calculated, the re- 
sult of ingenious calculation, not because any 
particular detail impresses the reader as conspicu- 
ously false — Poe keeps his distance from life 
too skilfully and consistently for this — but be- 
cause of their all-pervading lack of deeply human 
imagination and interest, because of that shallow- 
ness in Poe's hold upon life that has already been 
noted. The stories and the characters seem the 
work of pure intellect, of intellect divorced from 
heart ; and for that very reason they do not wholly 
satisfy, when judged by the most exacting artistic 
standards. They seem the product of some ingen- 
ious mechanism for the manufacture of fiction, of 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 125 

some surpassing rival of MaelzePs chess-playing 
automaton. This faultily faultless accuracy and 
precision of movement may very likely be a penalty 
Poe has to submit to because of his devotion to art 
for art's sake. He is too much engrossed in treat- 
ment and manipulation ; his dexterity of execution 
perhaps presupposes, at any rate goes along with, 
an almost exclusive interest in technical problems 
and in " effects," to the neglect of what is vital and 
human in the material he uses. 

Closely akin to this dryness of treatment is a 
certain insincerity of tone or flourish of manner, 
that often interferes with our enjoyment of Poe. 
We become suddenly aware of the gleaming eye 
and complacent smile of the concealed manipu- 
lator in the writing-automaton. The author is too 
plainly lying in wait for us ; or he is too ostenta- 
tiously exhibiting his cleverness and resource, his 
command of the tricks of the game. One of the 
worst things that can be said of Poe from this point 
of view is that he contains the promise and potency 
of Mr. Eobert Hichens, and of other cheap English 
decadents. Poe himself is never quite a mere acro- 
bat ; but he suggests the possible coming of the 
acrobat, the clever tumbler with the ingenious 
grimace and the palm itching for coppers. 

The same perfect mastery of technique that is 
characteristic of Poe's treatment of material is 
noticeable in his literary style. When one stops to 
consider it, Poe's style, particularly in his romances, 



126 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

is highly artificial, an exquisitely fabricated medium. 
Poe is fond of inversions and involutions in his 
sentence-structure, and of calculated rhythms that 
either throw into relief certain picturesque words, 
or symbolize in some reverberant fashion the mood 
of the moment. He seems to have felt very keenly 
the beauty of De Quincey's intricate and sophisti- 
cated cadences, and more than once he actually 
echoes some of the most noteworthy of them in his 
own distribution of accents. Special instances of 
this might be pointed out in Eleonora and in 
The Premature Burial. Poe's fondness for arti- 
ficial musical effects is also seen in his emphatic 
reiteration of specially picturesque phrases, a trick 
of manner that every one associates with his poetry, 
and that is more than once found in his prose writ- 
ings. "And, all at once, the moon arose through the 
thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in color. And 
mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood 
by the shore of the river, and was lighted by the 
light of the moon. And the rock was gray, and 
ghastly, and tall — and the rock was gray." Echo- 
lalia, Herr Nordau would probably call this trick in 
Poe's verse and prose, and he would regard it as an 
incontestable proof of Poe's degeneracy. Never- 
theless, the beauty of the effects to which this man- 
nerism leads in Poe's more artificial narratives is 
very marked. 

In Poe's critical essays his style takes on an alto- 
gether different tone and movement, and becomes 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 127 

analytical, rapid, incisive, almost acrid in its sever- 
ity and intellectuality. The ornateness and the 
beauty of cadence and colour that are characteristic 
of his decorative prose disappear entirely. Signifi- 
cantly enough, Macaulay was his favourite literary 
critic. "The style and general conduct of Mac- 
aulay's critical papers," Poe assures his readers, 
"could scarcely be improved." A strange article 
of faith to find in the literary creed of a dreamer, 
an amateur of moods, an artistic epicure. Yet that 
Poe was sincere in this opinion is proved by the 
characteristics of his own literary essays. He 
emulates Macaulay in his briskness, in the down- 
rightness of his assertions, in his challengingly de- 
monstrative tone, and in his unsensitiveness to the 
artistic shade. Of course, he is far inferior to 
Macaulay in knowledge and in thoroughness of 
literary training, while he surpasses him in acute- 
ness of analysis and in insight into technical 
problems. 

Poe's admiration for Macaulay and his emulation 
of him in his critical writings are merely further 
illustrations of the peculiar intellectual aridity that 
has already been noted as characteristic of him. 
Demonic intellectual ingenuity is almost the last 
word for Poe's genius as far as regards his real 
personality, the quintessential vital energy of the 
man. His intellect was real ; everything else about 
him was exquisite feigning. His passion, his 
human sympathy, his love of nature, all the emo- 



128 EDGAR ALLAN POE 

tions that go into his fiction, have a counterfeit 
unreality about them. Not that they are actually 
hypocritical, but that they seem unsubstantial, 
mimetic, not the expression of a genuine nature. 
There was something of the cherub in Poe, and he 
had to extract his feelings from his head. Much of 
the time a reader of Poe is cajoled into a delighted 
forgetfulness of all this unreality, Poe is so adroit 
a manipulator, such a master of technique. He 
adapts with unerring tact his manner to his matter 
and puts upon us the perfect spell of art. More- 
over, even when a reader forces himself to take 
notice of Poe's artificiality, he may, if he be in the 
right temper, gain only an added delight, the sort 
of delight that comes from watching the exquisitely 
sure play of a painter's firm hand, adapting its 
action consciously to all the difficulties of its sub- 
ject. Poe's precocious artistic sophistication is one 
of his rarest charms for the appreciative amateur. 
But if a reader be exorbitant and relentless and ask 
from Poe something more than intellectual re- 
source and technical dexterity, he is pretty sure 
to be disappointed ; Poe has little else to offer him. 
Doubtless it is Philistinish to ask for this some- 
thing more ; but people have always asked for it in 
the past, and seem likely to go on asking for it, 
even despite the fact that Herr Max Nordau has 
almost succeeded in reducing the request to an 
absurdity. 



CHAELOTTE BRONTE 

Charlotte Bkonte was once reproached by 
the vivacious and ever-confident George Henry- 
Lewes for not more nearly resembling, in her 
artistic methods, that favourite novelist of the 
gently cynical and worldly wise, — Jane Austen. 
Her answering letter, while in tone very prettily 
submissive, nevertheless justifies vigorously her 
own methods of writing and her treatment of 
life. " If I ever do write another book," she says, 
"I think I will have nothing of what you call 
^melodrama'; I think so, but I am not sure. I 
tliinhy too, I will endeavour to follow the counsel 
which shines out of Miss Austen's ^mild eyes,' 
< to finish more and be more subdued ' ; but neither 
am I sure of that. When authors write best, or, at 
least, when they write most fluently, an influence 
seems to waken in them, which becomes their 
master, — which will have its own way, — putting 
out of view all behests but its own, dictating cer- 
tain words, and insisting on their being used, 
whether vehement or measured in their nature ; 
new-moulding characters, giving unthought-of turns 
to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old 
K 129 



130 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new 
ones." 

These words of Miss Bronte's carry with them 
a flash from eyes very different in quality from 
" Miss Austen's mild eyes," and they express more 
than a passing mood of protest. Charlotte Bronte 
really believed in her daemon. She had the faith 
which so many romantic poets from Blake to 
Shelley have confessed to, that her words and 
images were, not cleverly devised, but inevitably 
suggested. Novelists do not often take themselves 
so seriously, at least in public, particularly novel- 
ists who keep so sanely near the world of fact as 
Charlotte Bronte keeps. Your Poe and your Hoff- 
mann may professedly dream out and set down 
their wildly fantastic tales with the same vision- 
ary glibness with which Coleridge wrote Kuhla 
Khan. But the noteworthy fact is that Charlotte 
Bronte lays claim to much this same sort of inspi- 
ration for her narratives of actual Yorkshire life. 
Her visions of characters and. incidents must have 
mastered her like veritable hallucinations to lead 
to such a claim; and this visionary eye of hers 
may well account, at least in part, for the aston- 
ishing vividness of her narratives and for their 
success in again and again imposing themselves 
for moments on our faith with a thoroughness that 
the more sophisticated art of to-day rarely attains. 
Charlotte Bronte has something of the seer's per- 
suasiveness ; she captures our faith at unawares. 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 131 

In the letter already quoted Charlotte Bronte, 
while commenting on Jane Austen's work, puts 
to Lewes a very pertinent question. " Can there 
be a great artist," she asks, " without poetry ? " 
She herself believed not, and her novels are 
from first to last faithful illustrations of her 
creed. It was not for nothing that she lived for 
so many years a lonely, introspective life be- 
tween an overcrowded graveyard and the deso- 
late expanses of the Yorkshire moors. The world, 
as she conceived of it, was not the world of con- 
ventional intrigue in drawing-rooms or pump-rooms 
or gossiping country-side towns ; and the news of 
the world that she sent out through her novels 
was news that had come to her not by hearsay 
or tittle-tattle, or authenticated by painstaking 
watchfulness in the midst of tea-drinkers and 
scandal-mongers, but news that could bear the 
comment of the sweep of the moors by day and 
of the host of stars by night. She was a lyrical 
poet, and in each of her novels she set herself 
the task, or rather, her whole energy went into 
the task, of re-creating the world in such guise 
that it should have something of the intrinsic 
beauty of poetry conferred upon it. 

Her interpretation of life was, first of all, a 
woman's interpretation. This is, of course, the 
conventional thing to say of Charlotte Bronte ; but 
here, as so often, the conventional thing is the true 
thing, merely in need of a little exposition. Her 



132 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 

novels are not feminine readings of life simply 
in the sense of portraying the passion of love from 
a woman's point of view. This she does, to be 
sure, with a power and a beauty that George Eliot, 
for example, with her impersonal point of view 
and her withering sense of the rights of intel- 
lect, never attains to. But vibrant Jane Eyrism 
is far from being the sole staple out of which 
Charlotte Bronte's novels are wrought. Intense 
sympathy with human love in all its myriad forms, 
together with an audacious belief in its power to 
bring happiness, or something better than happi- 
ness, is, one is tempted to assert, that sole staple. 
She has an obsession of reckless faith in the worth 
of love, and from first to last her novels are full 
of the pathos of craving hearts, and of the worth 
that life gains when their craving is contented. 
It is in the tenderness and strength of her loyalty 
to love in all its guises, and in her delicate per- 
ception and brave portrayal of all the fine minis- 
trations of love to life, that the peculiar feminine 
quality of her novels resides. 

Eor Charlotte Bronte, the struggle for life is the 
struggle for affection. There is a pathetic uni- 
formity in the development of her stories when 
one stops to analyze them. In each, some creature 
striving for happiness is the central controlling 
character, and the plot of the story is the process 
by which this needy pensioner of the author is 
ultimately made heir to unexpected stores of ap- 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 133 

preciation and sympathy and love. ; Jane Eyre, at 
the opening of her history, is a tragically isolated 
little figure, without a sincere friend in the world, 
and symbolically busy over a woodcut of the 
lonely and frigid arctic regions. At the close, 
she has three excellent cousins— ^the two girls 
are as good as sisters; she casually gets, at 
the same time with her relatives, a very decent 
fortune; and above all, she falls heir to the vast 
hoard of passion long secreted in the caverns of 
Rochester's heart. Lucy Snowe in Villette has much 
the same fate ; after long months or years of lone- 
liness, she gets back old friends who are thrice as 
friendly as before; and the story of Villette is 
simply the histor}^ of Lucy's search for sympathy 
and of her acquisition of Monsieur Paul. The 
same is true of Shirley; the reader's vital interest 
in the story depends on his wish to see Caroline 
Helstone, Shirley, and Louis Moore duly fitted 
out with their fair share of love: Caroline wins 
a mother and a lover in a month ; and Shirley also, 
as the reader doubtless remembers, fares sump- 
tuously at the last. It is droll to note how little 
any of Charlotte Bronte's heroines care for litera- 
ture or art. She herself was apparently hungry 
for fame as a writer, but all her heroines are lovers 
of life, and of life only ; not one of them so much 
as coquets with art or literature except as she may 
write " exercises " for some favourite master. Very 
un-modern are all these young women, and the 



134 CHARLOTTE BRONTS 

young men, too, for that matter, with, no subtle 
dilettante theories, no morbid contempt for life, no 
erratic veins of enthusiasm or strange kinds of 
faculty or of genius. They are all simply bent on 
getting happiness through love of one sort or 
another. 

Dorothea Brooke and her abstract ideal enthu- 
siasm, Charlotte Bronte could not have conceived 
or created, any more than she could have traced 
out with relentless sociological and psychological 
detail the revenge that the " world " took on 
Dorothea for her fine passion of unconventionality. 
Not that Charlotte Bronte was less brave in her 
contempt of cheap worldly standards than George 
Eliot ; but Dorothea's spiritual restlessness and 
ambition sprang from a complexity of moral and 
mental life that Charlotte Bronte's culture was too 
narrow to have suggested to her, and involves a 
passion for subtler kinds of goodness than Char- 
lotte Bronte's simple, intense nature brought within 
her ken. Jane Eyre, when waxing discontented 
with the tameness of her early life at Thornfield 
Hall, describes her longing to get away in search 
of " other and more vivid kinds of goodness." 
More vivid kinds of goodness than those that the 
common run of mortals reach — these Charlotte 
Bronte ardently believed in and portrayed. Much 
of the permanent power of her stories comes from 
the "impetuous honesty" (to quote from Thack- 
eray's characterization of her), and the fiery inten- 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 135 

sity of imagination with which, she puts before 
even readers of the present day her sense and 
vision of what life may be made to mean for those 
who will live sincerely and resolutely. There is 
something elemental in her. She gives a new 
zest to life like the encounter with a bit of wild 
nature, — with a sea-breeze or the tense germinat- 
ing silence in the depths of a wood. But she is 
elemental at the cost of being primitive, — primi- 
tive in her devotion to a few great interests, and in 
her lack of refining complexity of thought. Hence 
one's sense in reading her that one is moving in a 
world remote from the present. Her heroines 
indulge in no self-analysis, have no quarrels with 
their consciences, no torturing doubts about duty, 
no moral or spiritual struggles. They are curiously 
definite and resolute little persons, who at every 
crisis know in a trice just where duty lies and just 
what they want to do. Their minds are clear, their 
ideas about what makes life worth while are cer- 
tain, their wills are intact; their only quarrel is 
with circumstance. They have no wish to play 
with life imaginatively, no sense of the cost of 
committing themselves to a single ideal, no critical 
fear of the narrowing effects of action./ What 
would Charlotte Bronte have made, one wonders, 
of Marie Bashkirtzeff ? 

Life itself, then, not fancies or speculations about 
life, — life of an almost primitive intensity, — is 
what Charlotte Bronte's novels still offer to 



136 CHARLOTTE BRONTS 

/readers of to-day who may be surfeited with in- 
tellectual refinements of thought and feeling. 
Doubtless there is in her work something of the 
romantic false preference for savagery and bar- 
barism over civilization, and of the romantic in- 
clination to confuse crudeness with strength. She 
loathes conventional life and commonplace char- 
acters, and her art has to pay the penalty through 
growing now and then melodramatic and absurd: 
Her heroes, notably Eochester and Monsieur Paul, 
cannot always get themselves taken seriously. 
Their grotesqueness is overaccentuated. They 
seem to study oddity. They drape themselves in 
extravagance as in a mantle. But although Miss 
Bronte's romantic bias — her fondness for the 
strange — may now and then distort the action and 
the characters of her stories, she never, unless 
rarely in her last novel, Villette, offends in her own 
style. She never rants ; her taste is sure. Even 
in describing the most exciting scenes, her style 
has no strut and no stridency. And so it is easy 
to forgive the occasional grotesqueness of her inci- 
dent and to yield to the sincerity of her art. Her 
romances deal with confessedly exceptional states 
of passion, — with almost such passions as a lyrical 
poet might deal with. And the imaginative truth 
and the beauty of phrase with which she realizes 
the moods of her heroines — moods which have 
the beat of the heart behind them, and are not 
mere fancies of brain-sick dilettantes — give to 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 137 

many passages in her stories almost the splendour 
and power of lyrical poetry. 

It used to be said of Dante Gabriel Eossetti that 
life was, with him, always at a crisis. Much the 
same thing is true of Charlotte Bronte and of her 
heroines. Her novels — and this, when one stops 
to consider, helps largely to give them their peculiar 
tone — are perpetually busy with emotional crises ; 
they are bent on portraying just the feverish ex- 
pectation, the poignant grief, the joy, the glow of 
passion, which some special moment or incident 
stirs in the heart of the heroine. Very often the 
moods that colour her fiction are moods of anxiety, 
of breathless waiting, of nervous suspense. Jane 
Eyre's moods are continually of this sort. "I 
shall be called discontented," she says in one place. 
"I could not help it; the restlessness was in my 
nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then 
my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the 
third story, backward and forward, safe in the 
silence and solitude of the spot." 

Early and late in Jane Eyre, these moments of 
eager waiting, sometimes for a definite sorrow or 
joy or excitement, sometimes merely with poignant 
longing for change, are described fully and vividly. 
When Jane, still a wee girl, has to make a start 
by coach before break of day for a distant school, 
the childish, half-haggard worry of the early morn- 
ing is not taken for granted, but is put before the 
reader with almost oppressive truth. Jane's drive, 



138 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 

many years later, across the country to Thornfield 
Hall, and her tremulous sensitiveness meantime to 
every new impression, — these also are keenly 
realized and faithfully reproduced. Throughout 
the story, wherever she is, Jane is continually 
aware of the sky-line and half-consciously quarrel- 
ling with the horizon. At Thornfield she often 
climbed to the leads of the Hall and " looked out 
afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim 
sky-line," and " longed for a power of vision which 
might overpass that limit." And earlier, at Lo- 
wood, she speaks of " the hilly horizon," and adds : 
*^My eye passed all other objects to rest on those 
most remote, the blue peaks ; it was those I longed 
to surmount." 

Lucy Snowe, whose fortunes make up the story 
of Villette, is not quite so fiery a young parti- 
cle as Jane Eyre; but she has almost as many 
moods of thrilling restlessness to tell about. Her 
nerves vibrate to the " subtle, searching cry of the 
wind " ; she answers half-superstitiously to all the 
skyey influences ; she watches with a breathless 
exhilaration the Aurora Borealis, — its " quivering 
of serried lances," " its swift ascent of messengers 
from below the north star." And so throughout 
Jane Eyre and Villette, — Shirley, as will presently 
be noted, is somewhat differently conceived, — 
moods of acute and febrile intensity are imagina- 
tively put before us. We are kept perpetually 
within sound of the heroine's breathing, and are 



CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 139 

forced to watch from hour to hour the anguished 
or joyful play of her pulse. The moods are not 
difficult moods, or subtly reflective moods ; they are 
not the ingenious imitations of feelings which the 
pseudo-artistic temperament of to-day vamps up to 
while away the time and in emulation of the woes 
of special souls. They are the veritable joys and 
sorrows of eager and keenly sensitive natures that 
are bent above all upon living, and that never think 
of posing, or of mitigating the severity of life by 
artistic watchfulness over their own experiences. 
They are primitive, elemental, tyrannical emotions, 
and not to be disbelieved. 

( Another source of the almost lyrical intensity 
which runs through Charlotte Bronte's fiction is 
her sensitiveness to natural beauty. She had all 
a romantic poet's tremulous awareness of the bright 
and shadowed world of moor and field and sky. 
Her nerves knew nature through and through and 
answered to all its changing moods, and rarely do 
her stories, even when the scene is laid in a city, 
leave long out of notice the coursing of the clouds, 
the sound of the winds, the gay or ominous play of 
light and shade through the hours of the day, the 
look of the moon at night. The creativeness of 
her imagination, its searching inclusiveness, are not 
to be missed. It is a whole new world she gives us ; 
she is not content with working out for us the acts or 
thoughts or looks of imaginary folk who may move 
satisfactorily across any sort of conventional stage. 



140 CHAKLOTTE BRONTE 

Her imagination is too elemental for this, too vital, 
includes too much of the universe within its sensi- 
tive grasp. Her people are knit by "organic fila- 
ments" to the nature they inhabit, and they can 
be thoroughly and persuasively realized only as 
their sensitive union with this nature-world which 
is their home is continually suggested.^ With the 
romantic poet, the individual is far more closely 
dependent on the vast instinctive world of nature 
for comfort and help and even for the life of the 
spirit, than on the conventional world of society, 
to which his relations seem to such a poet more 
nearly accidental. In her sympathy with this 
conception of man as intimately communing with 
the mysterious life of the physical universe, Char- 
lotte Bronte shows once more her romantic bias. 

Accordingly, the pages of her novels are full 
of delicate transcripts of the changing aspects of 
night and day, as these aspects record themselves 
on sensitive temperaments — more particularly on 
the temperaments of her heroines. Jane Eyre is 
perhaps most richly wrought with these half-lyri- 
cal impressions of what the earth and the sky have 
to say to the initiated. Yet, even through the 
more objective Shirley, Charlotte Bronte's love 
of nature follows her unmistakably, — the hero, 
Moore, owing his very name to her passion for 
the wild Yorkshire downs. In Villette, the scene 
is in Brussels ; yet Charlotte Bronte's imagination, 
even when thus circumscribed, will not wholly 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 141 

give up the world of nature, and Lucy Snowe finds 
in the wind, in the sky, in the moon, companion- 
able presences whose varying aspects and utter- 
ances symbolize again and again her joys or griefs 
or wringing anxieties. "It was a day of winter 
east winds," she says in one place, "and I had 
now for some time entered into that dreary fellow- 
ship with the winds and their changes, so little 
known, so incomprehensible, to the healthy. The 
north and the east owned a terrific influence, mak- 
ing all pain more poignant, all sorrow sadder. The 
south could calm, the west sometimes cheer ; unless 
indeed, they brought on their wings the burden of 
thunder-clouds, under the weight and warmth of 
which all energy died.'' Of the moon as well as 
the winds, Lucy is strangely watchful; and often 
at some crisis in her externally placid but internally 
stormy life she describes its splendour or its sad- 
ness. So in Chapter xii: "A moon was in the 
sky, not a full moon, but a young crescent. I 
saw her through a space in the boughs overhead. 
She and the stars, visible beside her, were no 
strangers where all else was strange; my child- 
hood knew them. I had seen that golden sign 
with the dark globe in its curve leaning back 
on azure, beside an old thorn at the top of an old 
field, in Old England, in long past days, just as 
it now leaned back beside a stately spire in this 
continental capital." Again: "Leaving the radiant 
park and well-lit Haute-Ville ... I sought the dim 



142 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

lower quarter. Dim I should not say, for the 
beauty of the moonlight — forgotten in the park — 
here once more flowed in upon perception. High 
she rode, and calm and stainlessly she shone. . . . 
The rival lamps were dying; she held her course 
like a white fate." Finally, a single passage may 
be quoted from Shirley because of the way it testi- 
fies, through the moon's subjugation of the surly 
and stormy temperament of old Yorke, to both 
the dramatic and the romantic power of Charlotte 
Bronte's imagination. Yorke, the brusque and vio- 
lent Yorkshire squire, riding in the late evening 
over the downs with Moore, the hero, has been 
betrayed into talk about a woman he had long ago 
loved ; suddenly he breaks off. " ^ The moon is up,' 
was his first not quite relevant remark, pointing 
with Jiis whip across the moor. * There she is, ris- 
ing into the haze, staring at us in a strange red 
glower. She is no more silver than old Helstone's 
brow is ivory. What does she mean by leaning her 
cheek on Kushedge i' that way, and looking at us 
wi' a scowl and a menace?'" 

Charlotte Bronte's sensitiveness to the sinister 
or seductive beauty of the moon, illustrated by 
all these passages, may be taken as typical of 
her relation to all nature, and of her use of it 
throughout her stories. She has an almost tran- 
scendental faith in the meaning of natural sights 
and sounds ; she reproduces them with a glamour 
that only a romantic imagination can catch and 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 143 

suggest; and the unmistakable sincerity of her 
moods and the lyrical intensity of her interpreta- 
tions help to give to her novels a peculiarly vivid 
beauty that the modern instructed, scientific, and 
faithless novelist can rarely attain to. 

Finally, from the primitiveness, good faith, and 
concentration on essentials that have been noted as 
characteristic of Miss Bronte, and from her fiercely 
insistent dramatic imagination, there results the 
remarkable power and persuasiveness of the really 
great scenes of crisis in her stories.- Perhaps the 
grea:iest of these scenes are those that follow Jane's 
discovery that Rochester's wife is still alive. The 
seening truth of these, their air of being personal 
experiences poignantly remembered, remains mar- 
vellous even for the wariest and most modern of 
readers. No rightly constituted mind can dis- 
b3lieve in the details of Jane's flight from Thorn- 
field across the moors, in her solitary night on the 
heath under " the cloudless night-sky," in her sud- 
den glimpse of " the mighty milky way," and her 
"nestling to the breast of the hill." The end of 
the flight may well enough seem ludicrously unreal 
— Jane's lucky discovery of her cousins in their 
little cottage set in the measureless waste of the 
moors ; plainly there is some tampering here with 
the world-order, some bribing of fate. But in spite 
of this jarring of the antiquated mechanism of the 
plot, — a disillusioning mischance against which 
we are never quite safe with Miss Bronte — Jane's 



144 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 

feelings and sensations, her agonizing dislieartea- 
ment, her pathetic clinging to nature for com- 
fort and momentary relief, her poignant passing 
glimpses of the beauty of flowers and heath and 
stars and of the freshness of the morning, her 
growing weakness and half-delirious wanderings, 
— all these experiences and moods refuse to be 
disbelieved, and grasp at the very heart ot the 
reader. A few such passages in Jane Eyre have 
almost the burning colour and the self-suiflcing 
vividness of great romantic poems like the Ancient 
Mariner. 

The new world, then, into which Charlotte Bronte's 
imagination inducts the modern reader and of which 
she makes him free, is a world where casuistry and 
philosophy are unknown, where they put no mist 
of abstractions between the reader and the poignant 
fact. It is a world where love and hate and tie 
few great primary savage passions, of which recent 
literary folk of the first order fight so shy, aie 
portrayed vigorously and convincingly. It is a 
world in which the elements, air and earth and 
water, flash and blossom and ripple, where the 
clouds -and the winds, the sun and the moon, are 
never quite out of mind, and set the nerves a-tin- 
gle and put the imagination in play, even of 
the folk who are shut indoors. 

And yet, though life, as Charlotte Bronte portrays 
it, is so passionate, and though the world is so primi- 
tive and elemental, the life that she puts before us 



CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 145 

is actual life, not a whimsical or fantastic or falsi- 
fying counterfeit of life, and the world in which 
her characters live and move and have their being, 
is the actual world, not a mystical dream-region, 
beautifully false in its colours and chiaroscuro 
and artificially filled like Hawthorne's world, for 
example, with omens and portents and moral sym- 
bolism. Her characters, too, are real men and 
women, not types, not figures in melodrama, not 
creatures of one idea, or one humour, or one pas- 
sion. Doubtless they are not studied with the 
minuteness that modern realists use. Yet they 
have complex personalities and lead thoroughly in- 
dividual lives. And they are flashed on the reader's 
retina with a vividness of colour and a dramatic 
truthfulness and suggestiveness in act and gesture 
that modern scientific novels rarely reach. Herein, 
perhaps, lies Charlotte Bronte's unique power, — 
in her ability to make her stories seem close to 
fact and yet strange and almost mystically imagina- 
tive. Her hallucinations are sane, and her victims 
of passion keep, after all, within the bounds of 
reason. 

And indeed this is an aspect of Charlotte 
Bronte's genius that has not in general been in- 
sisted upon sufficiently — her self-control and her 
loyalty to reason, in all that is essential, whether 
in art or in morals, a loyalty that is none 
the less consistent and controlling because it is 
half-grudging. As a result of this loyalty she 



146 CHAKLOTTE BRONTE 

escapes in her stories mucli of the extravagance 
and absurdity that her sisters were led into. In 
some respects, Emily Bronte was a greater artist 
than Charlotte ; she had an intenseness of vision, 
and an occasional beauty of image and phrase, 
that Charlotte Bronte never quite reaches. The 
vividness of some of her scenes and the acrid 
intensity of the counterfeit life in Wuthering 
Heights are beyond anything in Jane Eyre or 
Shirley. But the work of Emily Bronte is lacking 
in the moral and artistic sanity which is charac- 
teristic of Charlotte Bronte. Wuthering Heights has 
here and there greater lyrical beauty and power 
than anything that Charlotte Bronte has written. 
But Emily Bronte takes us wholly out of ordi- 
nary daylight into a region of nightmare horrors. 
Dante Eossetti used to say of Wutheriyig Heights 
that its scenes were laid in hell, though oddly 
enough the places and the people had English 
names. The story, too, is illogical and structure- 
less, and hence fails to make a lastingly great 
impression ; it spends itself in paroxysms and 
lacks sustained power and cumulative effect. 

Charlotte Bronte, on the other hand, is never 
completely the victim of her hallucinations. Con- 
temptuous as she may be of "common sense" in 
conventional matters, she is never really false to 
reason or careless of its dictates in the regions 
either of conduct or of art. When all is said, Jane 
EyrCf the wildest of her stories, is a shining example 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 147 

of the infinite importance, both in life and in art, 
of reason. As a story, it is from beginning to end 
admirably wrought. It moves forward with an 
inevitableness, a logic of passion, an undeviating 
aim, that become more and more impressive, the 
more familiar one is with the novel, and that mark 
it as the work of a soundly intellectual artist — of 
an artist who is instinctively true to the organizing 
force of reason as well as to the visions of a pas- 
sionate imagination. In spite of its length and 
wealth of detail, Jane Eyre is an admirably unified 
work of art. Every moment prepares for, or re- 
enforces, or heightens by way of subsequent con- 
trast, the effect of the tragic complication in the 
lives of Eochester and Jane Eyre, — the complica- 
tion in that passion which seeming for the moment 
about to bring perfect happiness to the dreary 
existence of the little green-eyed, desolate waif of 
a woman, finally overwhelms her and seems to 
have wrecked her life. The steady march of des- 
tiny may be heard if one will listen for it; the 
idi.iQ-moUf sounds almost as plainly as in Tristan 
und Isolde. To give us now and then this sense 
that we are watching the working out of fate, is 
the great triumph of the imaginative artist. 

To some, this praise of Jane Eyre may sound 
like droll hyperbole, for there are undoubtedly 
sadly distracting defects in the story which for 
certain readers, particularly on a first reading, 
mar irretrievably its essential greatness. The most 



148 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 

important of these have already been noted. " The 
long arm of coincidence" stretches out absurdly 
in one or two places, and makes all thought of 
fate for the moment grotesque. The vices and 
the ugliness of Rochester are dwelt upon with a 
fervour that suggests an old maid's belated infatua- 
tion for a monstrosity. The sempiternally solemn 
love-making of Jane and Eochester drones its piti- 
lessly slow length along, with no slightest ironical 
consciousness or comment on the part of the 
author. These faults and these lapses of taste 
are undeniably exasperating, but they grow less 
prominent as one comes to know the story inti- 
mately and to feel its strenuous movement and 
sincerity ; and they finally sink, for any reader 
who has an instinct for essentials, into their true 
place, as superficial blemishes on a powerfully 
original work of art. 

Of the existence of these defects in Jane Eyre, 
however, Charlotte Bronte was liberally informed 
by the critics, and in her later stories she guards 
against them. Both Shirley and Villette are freer 
from absurdities than Jane Eyre; neither is quite 
so frankly devout toward the outre, and in both a 
certain insidious humour is cultivated. Shirley is a 
roundabout tribute to Thackeray. The point of 
view, the method, the tone, are the result of a 
hero-worshipping study of the novelist to whom 
Jane Eyre was finally dedicated. The story aims 
to be more a criticism of life than Jane Eyre, and 



CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 149 

less a personal confession; the point of view is 
that of " the author," and the tone is often whim- 
sical or ironical. From the very first page the 
style betokens a changed attitude toward life. 
The novel is not to be a semi-lyrical record of 
moods of hope and grief and revolt and passion 
and joy; it is to portray with a certain delicate 
and at times ironical detachment the fortunes of a 
small group of characters whom the author lov- 
ingly but shrewdly watches. The brisk satire at 
the expense of the curates is something that lies 
quite out of the scope of Jane Eyre. The gain 
that Shirley shows in conscious breadth of outlook 
and in confidence of bearing, — in authority, — is 
noteworthy. Jane Eyre is the work of an auda- 
cious solitary dreamer ; Shirley is the work of an 
author who has "arrived," who has made the 
world listen, and who feels sure that she has a 
right to speak. The monotonous poignancy of 
Jane Eyre gives place in Shirley to a wide range 
of moods ; the story moves forward with a buoy- 
ant sense of the charm of life as well as with a 
half-indignant sense of its daunting and harrowing 
difficulty. The author escapes from the tyranny 
of a single, somewhat morbid, though courageous, 
temperament, and gives us incidents and characters 
with more of the checkered light upon them that 
ordinary mortals are from day to day aware of. 

Shirley takes in, too, more of the light mis- 
cellaneousness of life than Jane Eyre, — more 



150 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

of its variegated surface. Jane Eyre concen- 
trates all the interest on the struggle of two 
hearts with fate; Shirley^ while loyal to the for- 
tunes of a few principal characters, suggests the 
whole little world of the country-side, through con- 
flict and cooperation with which these characters 
gain their strength and quality. At least it tries to 
suggest this world, — a world of curates, rectors, 
squires, and even labourers. Tea-drinkings and 
church festivals and labour riots are conscien- 
tiously set forth, and in the midst of their bustle 
and confusion the wooings of Robert Moore and 
Louis Moore go on. 

Yet one has after all but to think of Middle- 
march to feel how superficial in Charlotte Bronte's 
novels is the treatment of sociological detail. In 
Shirley the labourers and their riotous attacks 
on the mill are plainly enough simply used to 
heighten the effect of the plot; the rioters come 
in almost as perfunctorily as the mob in a melo- 
drama, and they pass out of view the moment they 
have served the purpose of giving the reader an 
exciting scene in which Moore may act heroically, 
and over which Shirley and Charlotte may feel 
intensely. The genius of Charlotte Bronte lay 
not in the power to realize minutely and thor- 
oughly the dependence of character on social en- 
vironment, but in her power to portray with lyrical 
intensity the fates of a few important characters. 
Shirley isolates its characters far less than Jane 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 151 

Eyre, — tries to see them and portray them as 
more intimately and complexly acted upon by a 
great many forces. It is therefore a wiser, saner, 
and more modern book than Jane Eyre. But in 
proportion it loses in intensity, passionate colour, 
and in subduing singleness of aim. The interest is 
divided; the dreamlike involvement of the reader 
in the mist of a single temperament's fancies and 
feelings disappears ; the peculiar, half -hypnotizing 
effect of Jane Eyre's murmurous, monotonous re- 
cital vanishes ; and in the place of all this we have 
a brilliant, often powerful, and undeniably pictur- 
esque and entertaining criticism of various aspects 
of Yorkshire life, written somewhat after the 
method that George Eliot later used much more 
skilfully. 

In Villette Charlotte Bronte returns to the per- 
sonal point of view and the more lyrical tone. 
Lucy Snowe, who is merely a reincarnation of Jane 
Eyre, though somewhat less energetic and less 
ugly, puts upon us in this story, as Jane Eyre had 
put upon us before, the spell of her dream, and 
imposes on us the sad or happy hallucinations that 
made up her life. In some respects, Villette is the 
most of a tour de force of Charlotte Bronte's novels. 
She takes for heroine a plain, shy, colourless school- 
teacher; she puts her in the midst of a girl's 
boarding-school, and keeps her there pitilessly 
from almost the start to the finish of the story; 
she makes use of hardly any exciting incident — 



152 CHAELOTTE BRONTE 

the Spectral Nun is a mere picturesque hoax, 
though her repeated introduction illustrates the 
weakness for sensationalism in plots that Charlotte 
Bronte could never quite rid herself of; there are, 
however, this time no mad wives, no hollow mys- 
terious laughter, no men or women with suspicious 
pasts. Yet in spite of the commonplace characters 
and the seemingly dull situations, the story that 
results holds the reader's interest firmly with its 
alternate gayety, pathos, and passion. In places 
it is as poignant as Jane Eyre. After all, we 
mortals are ridiculously sympathetic creatures; 
it is the fluttering of the human heart that cap- 
tures us; and Lucy Snowe's heart finds enough 
excitement in her Belgian boarding-school to jus- 
tify a great deal of passionate beating. 

Villette suffers, however, from a divided alle- 
giance on the part of the author. Her method in 
the story is plainly a compromise between the 
egoistic self-concentration of Jaiie Eyre and the 
professional detachment of Shirley. Lucy Snowe 
is made more speculative, less acridly self-assertive, 
than Jane Eyre, to the very end that she may note 
more of the ordinary happenings of life, and set 
down a more reflective and inclusive record of what 
goes on about her than the impassioned Jane would 
have had patience for. As a consequence, Villette 
gains in range but loses in intensity. The fortunes 
of the Bassompierres, which, in spite of Lucy's 
loyalty to the charm of these worthy folk, fail to 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 153 

perturb the reader very deeply, fill far too much, 
space. In a letter written about the time of the 
publication of the novel, Charlotte Bronte laments 
the weakness of the character of Paulina, and the 
apparent non-sequitur that results in the story from 
the early importance of the Bassompierres and of 
Dr. John, and from their later obscuration by 
Lucy's love for the Professor. This flickering 
purpose is perhaps the sign of the difficulty the 
author met in trying to be objective. The power 
to portray the world with passionate truth as seen 
through a woman's temperament, — a narrowly ex- 
acting and somewhat morbidly self-centred temper- 
ament, — this was the peculiar power of Charlotte 
Bronte; and in Jane Eyre this power found its 
perfect expression. In her other novels, though 
she wins a greater range, she sacrifices her peculiar 
coign of vantage. 

It must, then, be admitted with all frankness 
that life is not for most people the sort of thing 
that Charlotte Bronte represents. The moods that 
fill the pages of Jane Eyre are no more the com- 
mon moods with which the ordinary man or 
woman looks at life than are the lyrics of In 
Memoriam like the daily records of a clubman's 
thoughts. For most people, life is not perpetually 
at a crisis ; nor are they all the time yearning in- 
tensely for love and sympathy. Petty personal 
rivalries and the pleasure that comes from success 
in them, silly little vanities that fancy themselves 



154 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 

flattered, cheap bodily delights, a pleased ironical 
sense of the absurdities of other people, — these 
are the satisfactions that for half the world re- 
deem the monotony of existence and make it no 
hardship to go on living ; and these are precisely 
the phases of life that such novelists as Jane 
Austen delight to depict. Of all these frivolous 
feelings Charlotte Bronte's account of life con- 
tains scarcely a hint. Shirley now and then has 
glimpses of the absurd trivialities that the cynic 
likes to find and sneer at. But for the most 
part Charlotte Bronte is as oblivious as Shelley or 
Wordsworth of the possible delights of irony. Per- 
haps it is still an open question whether the iron- 
ical or the passionately sincere relation to life is 
the worthier in morals and in art. The imagina- 
tions that can reconcile the two are doubtless the 
most penetrating and potent. Miss Bronte showed 
that she could appreciate the ironical manner 
through her warm admiration of Thackeray, — an 
admiration, however, be it noted that expressly in- 
sists on the "sentiment, which, jealously hidden, but 
genuine, extracts the venom from that formidable 
Thackeray, and converts what might be corrosive 
poison into purifying elixir." As for her own work, 
however, she was too contemptuous of convention- 
ality in all its forms to be a fit interpreter of the 
Spirit of Comedy. 

Indeed, she now and then herself becomes in her 
art fair game for the Spirit of Comedy, because of 



CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 155 

the dulness of her conventional conscience. She 
does not always know when the laugh is bound to 
be against her. Her heroes often wax silly or 
grotesque. Eochester's smile which "he used but 
on rare occasions," his " ebon eyebrows," his " pre- 
cious grimness," his " bursts of maniacal rage," all 
his extravagances of look and demeanour, are in- 
sisted upon absurdly. Paul Emmanuel's tricks of 
manner, his wilfulness, his self-conceit, his fidgeti- 
ness, — these are played upon out of all measure, 
and described with a fondness that must now and 
then seem ludicrous. And so, too, with the peculiar- 
ities of Louis Moore ; his sardonic self-satisfaction, 
his somewhat pretentious iciness of demeanour, his 
Satanic pride and so on, are made abundantly gro- 
tesque through overemphasis. Melodramatic inci- 
dent, too. Miss Bronte shows a perilous fondness 
for. Not easy is it to take seriously the crazy wife 
of Eochester, who goes on all fours in an upper 
chamber, and now and then sallies forth to set fire 
to something or other. Excesses of this sort both 
in characterization and in incident are the penalty 
that Miss Bronte has to pay for her contempt for 
conventional standards and modes of judgment. 

Gradually she doubtless came to recognize the 
danger involved in her fondness for the abnormal, 
and in her distrust of everyday virtues and modes 
of life. In her last novel, ViUette, she tried to be 
fair to conventional types of men and women, and 
to portray worldly success sympathetically. In Dr. 



156 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

John Bretton she aims to draw the character of a 
well-bred, good-tempered, prosperous gentleman, — 
a man in no disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. 
And in Paulina she makes a brave effort to depict 
sympathetically a pretty and charming young soci- 
ety girl. Both Bretton and Paulina, however, are 
mere copperplate nonentities. Miss Bronte herself 
laments in one of her letters her failure with Paul- 
ina ; and John Graham Bretton, the handsome 
young doctor at whom Lucy Snowe confesses she 
dare not look for fear of being dazzled for a half- 
hour afterward, is also a mere figment. Paul Em- 
manuel is the real hero of Villette, — a hero in his 
own way as outre as Rochester himself. In Shirley, 
the insufferable Sympsons — Shirley's buckram 
uncle and his faultless daughters — together with 
Sir Philip Nunnely, the lily-fingered baronet, who 
writes sentimental verses, are the only really con- 
ventional folk portrayed. The daughters "knew 
by heart a certain young-ladies'-schoolroom code of 
laws on language, demeanour, etc. ; themselves 
never deviated from its curious little pragmatical 
provisions; and they regarded with secret, whis- 
pered horror all deviations in others." Mr. Symp- 
son's god was " the World," as Shirley tells him in 
a virago-like speech toward the close of the story. 
All these devotees of "correctness" Miss Bronte 
detests ; " these things we artists hate," as Blake 
said of the Mechanics^ Magazine. And her hatred 
of them gives a kind of dissenting bitterness to 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 157 

parts of her treatment of life, — a false note of 
acerbity like that of the professional heretic. This 
is another of the penalties she pays for that fervid 
unconventionality which was alike her strength 
aiid her weakness. 

In morals, her unconventionality will hardly 
seem nowadays very startling, although in her 
own day there was much head-wagging among 
prim persons, male and female, over the vagaries 
and frank passionateness of Jane Eyre. Miss 
Bronte never pleaded for a moral revolution. She 
had no prophetic glimpses of " the modern woman," 
and she neither preached nor implied a gospel of 
woman^s rights. She makes brisk war on Mrs. 
Grundy and on her notions of womanly propriety, 
but beyond this she never ventures. She limits 
herself expressly in the preface to the second edi- 
tion of Jane Eyre. " Conventionality is not moral- 
ity. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack 
the first is not to assail the last. . . . These things 
and deeds are diametrically opposed ; they are as 
distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often con- 
found them; they should not be confounded; ap- 
pearance should not be mistaken for truth." Never 
does one of Miss Bronte's heroines actually vio- 
late a moral law. Jane Eyre is a signal martyr 
to the sacredness of received ideas concerning 
marriage and divorce; and Eochester has to pay 
dearly for his lax notions about the rights of 
crazy wives. His Hall is burned and he just 



158 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 

misses burning with it; lie finally gets off with 
the loss of an arm and an eye and with sev- 
eral months of parboiled suffering. No ; Charlotte 
Bronte is a relentless little conservative as regards 
all the essentials of the moral code. Her ideal for 
woman is the traditional domestic ideal freed from 
worldliness and hypocrisy, — the domestic ideal 
purged of non-essentials and carried to the wth 
degree of potency. All her women are merely 
fragments till they meet a man they can adore. 

Perhaps, however, Shirley may be brought up 
as premonitory of the modern woman. In the 
"mutinous" Shirley, "made out of fire and air,'' 
frank and wilful and just a bit mannish, who 
parted her hair over one temple, who was not 
afraid of a musket, and who managed her own 
estate with a pretty air of self-sufficiency — surely, 
in her, so one is at first tempted to think, there is 
a suggestion of the new woman. Yet, after all, the 
suggestion is very slight. Shirley wears her man- 
nishness merely as a challenging bit of colour. She 
is not intellectual ; she has no theories ; in her 
heart of hearts she longs to be bitted and ruled; 
in the core of her nature she is very woman of 
very woman, delighting in bravado, in playing at 
shrewishness, and then in suddenly obeying orders. 
She is merely a modern Eosalind masquerading for 
a summer's day in doublet and hose. 

It nevertheless remains true that in one sense 
Charlotte Bronte prepared the way for the crusade 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 159 

of the modern woman. Her prodigiously vivid 
portrayal of the endless possibilities of woman's 
nature in power and passion and devotion inevi- 
tably suggests the rights of women to richer fields 
for the play of their faculties. *^ Women are 
supposed to be very calm generally," Jane Eyre 
exclaims; "but women feel just as men feel; they 
need exercise for their faculties and a field for 
their efforts as much as their brothers do; they 
suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a 
stagnation, precisely as men would suffer. ... It 
is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, 
if they seek to do more or to learn more than 
custom has pronounced necessary for their sex." 
This passage in Jane Eyre is indeed almost revo- 
lutionary. And although it cannot readily be 
paralleled elsewhere in Miss Bronte's writings, 
the spirit that pervades it, the indignation of 
its protest against tyrannical and contemptuous 
limitations of woman's freedom, doubtless runs 
through all her novels. In this sense she may 
truly be described as preparing the way for the 
saner and more generous conceptions of woman 
and of her relations to man, that are characteristic 
of our own day. 

What is true of Charlotte Bronte's ideas about 
women is true of her ethics in general. She has 
no radically new, no really revolutionary, doctrine. 
The great good in life — she is never weary of 
praising it and of illustrating its pricelessness — 



160 CHAKLOTTE BRONTE 

is pure human affection. Jane Eyre's cry, in a 
childish outbreak of feeling, is typical of all Miss 
Bronte's heroines: "If others don't love me, I 
would rather die than live." Each of her novels, 
as has already been noted, reduces in the last 
analysis to a pathetic quest after affection. 

Callousness of heart, lack of " true generous feel- 
ing," — this is for Miss Bronte the one fatal defect 
of character. Not even unflinching devotion to an 
abstract moral code or to a systematic round of 
religious observances can excuse in her eyes rigidity 
of nature and dearth of genuine human affection. 
Jane Eyre's cousin Eliza has her time parcelled out 
into ten minute intervals, which she spends day 
after day with splendid regularity on the same 
round of duties ; yet she is to Jane Eyre, and to 
Charlotte Bronte as well, anathema maranatlia, 
because she is " heartless." St. John Eivers, with 
whose fate the very last sentences in Jane Eyre 
concern themselves, is a still more striking case in 
point. He is consumed with religious zeal ; he is 
absolutely sincere in his devotion to the cause of 
religion. Yet because he sacrifices love to the 
successful pursuit of his mission, and because he 
acts from severely conceived principle instead of 
from warm human feeling, the fiery little author 
can hardly keep her hand from angry tremulous- 
ness while she portrays him. She loathes him 
because he forgets "the feelings and claims of little 
people, in pursuing his own large views." Intense 



CHAKLOTTE BKONTE 161 

imaginative sympathy with life in all its forms, — 
even with animals and with nature, — this is what 
Miss Bronte demands of the characters she will 
approve. There must be no cheap sentiment ; her 
heroes are apt to be stern or even ferocious in 
manner; but under a wilful exterior there must 
be a glowing spirit of human affection ready to 
flash out loyally, though capriciously, whenever 
there is real need. 

And it is because she believes so unswervingly 
in the worth of life as ministered to by love, and 
because she sets forth with such manifold truth of 
detail and such visionary intensity the realities of 
life and love, that her novels, in spite of their obvi- 
ous defects, keep their power, and are even in 
some ways doubly grateful in these latter days of 
cynical moralizing. She quickens faith in human 
nature and in human destiny. She gives the reader 
who will readily lend himself to her spell a new 
sense of the heights and depths of passion and of 
the unlimited possibilities of life. The finical reader 
will find in her much to shock him and bring his 
hand to his mouth, and the nicely intellectual 
reader will be sure that her naivete is by no means 
the finally satisfactory relation to life.i The ad- 
mirers of George Eliot and of Mrs. Ward will carp 
at her ethics or at her lack of them. Doubtless, 
her characters love love almost selfishly, and seem 
to struggle for it with something of the gambler^s 
greed. George Eliot's analyses of the dangers of 



162 CHAKLOTTE BRONTfi 

the self-centred and wilful pursuit even of love 
may lead to a mucli more scientifically accurate 
sense of tLe unimportance of the individual man or 
woman, and of the absurdity of hoping that the 
world will order itself to suit the needs of a single 
heart. George Eliot asserted the rights of the 
social order; Charlotte Bronte asserted the indi- 
vidual. And for that very reason her novels are 
tonic in these days when gently cynical resignation 
has become so largely a fashionable habit of mind 
in literature and art. George Eliot never tells of 
love at first hand, and always puts a mist of philoso- 
phizing and a blur of moral suasion between her 
readers and any passionate experience she recites. 
Charlotte Bronte tells of the joy and the terror and 
the tragedy of love and life with the intense direct- 
ness of the lyric poet, and hence even the direst 
sufferings her characters undergo do not daunt or 
depress the reader, but rather quicken his sense 
of kinship with all forms of human experience and 
his realization of the dignity and scope of man's 
nature. The human will is never at a disadvantage 
with Charlotte Bronte. The struggle with circum- 
stance and with fate is bitter, often exhausting; 
yet there is a curious constitutional buoyant cour- 
age in her work that more than counteracts any 
sympathetic sadness the story may for the moment 
carry with it. 

The same lyrical intensity that has been found 
in Miss Bronte's modes of conceiving life is charac- 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 163 

teristic of her style. It is a powerfully imaginative 
and at its best an intensely idiomatic style, and its 
beauty of imagery and passionate originality make 
possible her peculiar poetic re-creation of life. Her 
style has none of the sharp falsetto note that might 
be expected from a woman in a passion ; in spite 
of her fondness for melodramatic incident, Miss 
Bronte bridles her tongue and speaks with a terse- 
ness, a precision of phrase, and a reticence that 
might well serve as models for such modern 
masters of sensational fiction as Mr. Hall Caine. 
Charlotte Bronte is in very truth an imaginative 
artist in prose. She is loyal to the traditions of 
the best English literature. She has a delicate 
sense of the worth of words and of the possible 
beauty of sentences and of the charm of the care- 
fully-wrought paragraph. And this instinct for 
style is one more reason — and a prepotent one — 
why her novels are not going to be speedily swept 
into the dust-bins like the thousand and one novels 
of the 'Hady novelists'' of to-day, i— improvisers 
all, ready and slovenly reporters of personal anec- 
dote, ^'femmes qui parlent.^' 

Charlotte Bronte's style varies sensitively from 
novel to novel. In Jane Eyre it is nervous, eager, 
staccato, impassioned. Its tone is curiously per- 
sonal and intimate. One of the last chapters 
begins — "Reader, I married him." This half- 
appealing, confidential note sounds often through 
the story, which may almost be described as a long 



164 CHARLOTTE BRONTS 

series of strangely minute and frank confessions 
murmured to the reader in Jane Eyre's own voice, 
— in " that peculiar voice of hers," to quote from 
Rochester, " so animating and piquant, as well as 
soft." In Shirley the style is gayer, brisker, less 
personal, more professional, more audacious, more 
satirical. In Villette there is a return toward the 
introspective and intensely emotional style of Jane 
Eyre, but the tone is less vibrant with feeling, 
more reflective and observantly amused. And 
partly, doubtless, as a result of the author's success 
and sense of responsibility, the vice of fine writing 
appears in this last of her novels. Repeatedly she 
writes at her readers, expatiates on art or on other 
abstract topics, and in a few instances even in- 
dulges in over-rhapsodical passages of sentimental 
description. Yet, in spite of these lapses, Villette 
contains as many memorable phrases and images 
as Jane Eyre or Shirley. 

In all her novels alike, her style is exquisitely 
specific ; it gives us a great deal of the surface of 
life — of the aspect both of characters and dramatic 
scenes and of nature. Lucy Snowe somewhere 
boasts of her liking for " nice details " ; she caught 
this fancy from her creator. Charlotte Bronte 
always has flashingly present in her mind the shapes 
and the contours of the world and all the phases of 
the dramatic action that she describes. The truth 
of her transcripts from nature has already been 
illustrated. She is "one of those for whom the 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 165 

visible world exists." She has seen and loved the 
colour-schemes of spring and autumn and winter, 
and of morning and evening. "It was a still 
night — calm, dewy, cloudless; the gables turned 
to the west, reflected the clear amber of the horizon 
they faced ; the oaks behind were black ; the cedar 
was blacker; under its dense, raven boughs a 
glimpse of the sky opened gravely blue; it was 
full of the moon, which looked solemnly and 
mildly down on Caroline from beneath that sombre 
canopy." . . . "All the hot summer day burned 
away like a Yule-log; the crimson of its close 
perished; I was left bent among the cool blue 
shades, over the pale and ashen gleams of its 
night." Nor is she merely finely observant of 
the hues and tints that play over the surface 
of the great earth-ball and the crystal sphere of 
the heavens; she knows the moods which these 
colour-chords can send vibrating across sensitive 
nerves, and these moods she suggests with great 
beauty of phrasing. 

Her style is prevailingly an imaginative style; 
images continually spring to her lips to express 
moods or to suggest the peculiar charm of the 
life that she portrays. In Villette the heroine 
speaks of "the strange necromantic joys of fancy" 
that were hers; these necromantic joys Char- 
lotte Bronte herself knew well; they cast flick- 
ering lights and shadows across many of her 
pages. Yet this hardly suggests, after all, the 



166 CHARLOTTE BRONTS 

fervour and gravity of her most characteristic 
imaginative prose. She is not playful ; she is not 
whimsical; she is strenuous and sombre; or she 
is tremulously eager in welcoming and treasuring 
in words some serious splendour that nature or 
human passion reveals to her. Passages enough 
have already been quoted to illustrate the power 
and beauty of her imaginative interpretation of 
nature. But one or two more passages may be 
adduced to illustrate her treatment of passion, — 
the unfaltering and flawless sincerity, and the 
sombre intensity of phrase with which she de- 
scribes it. Take, for example, the paragraphs that 
recite Jane Eyre's first moments of suffering when 
she finds she must abandon Rochester : — 

" One idea only throbbed life-like within me 
— a remembrance of God: it begot an unuttered 
prayer: these words went wandering up and down 
in my rayless mind, as something that should be 
whispered; but no energy was found to express 
them — 

" ' Be not far from me, for trouble is near : there 
is none to help.' 

" It was near : and as I had lifted no petition to 
Heaven to avert it, — as I had neither joined my 
hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips, — it 
came : in full heavy swing the torrent poured over 
me. The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my 
love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, 
swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen 



CHAELOTTE BRONTE 167 

mass. The bitter hour cannot be described: in 
truth, ^the waters came into my soul; I sank in 
deep mire ; I felt no standing ; I came into deep 
waters; the floods overflowed me.'^' The same 
sombre splendour that illuminates this long lyrical 
passage glows out often in a single image. " The 
human heart can suffer. It can hold more tears 
than the ocean holds waters. We never know how 
deep — how wide it is, till misery begins to un- 
bind her clouds, and fill it with rushing black- 
ness." Again and again Charlotte Bronte puts in a 
single sentence a vivid and beautiful impression of 
nature with a delicacy of perception and a sure- 
ness of phrasing that show how essentially poetic 
was her genius. ^' The wind sighed low in the 
firs : all was moorland loneliness, and midnight 
hush." Moore " wore a countenance . . . like a 
still, dark day, equally beamless and breezeless." 
" He met her with caution, and replied to her in 
his softest tones, as if there was a kind of gossa- 
mer happiness hanging in the air which he feared 
to disturb by drawing too deep a breath." " The 
rain is over and gone, and there is a tender shining 
after it." "That morning I was disposed for si- 
lence ; the austere beauty of the winter day had on 
me an awing, hushing influence. That passion of 
January, so white and so bloodless, was not yet 
spent; the storm had raved itself hoarse, but 
seemed no nearer exhaustion." Such sentences 
as these are charged with beauty, and are almost 



168 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

as full of delight for the lover of style as a lyric 
poem. The romantic glamour, too, of most of them 
can hardly be missed. 

The peculiar play of Charlotte Bronte's imagi- 
nation must now be apparent. Eomantic she is 
in the sense that she makes the world over in 
terms of intense personal emotion. Life as she 
portrays it is continually stirring with a pathetic 
unrest ; it is wistful, — femininely reaching out 
after completion. Life is haunted, too; the pass- 
ing moments are full of presentiments; no single 
hour is enough to itself; it is nervously aware of 
change. Her characters are out of the common; 
their hearts are with them late and soon; the 
story of their lives is the story of some affection 
or some passion that succeeds or fails. For the 
things of the mind her people care only by the 
way; the same is true, one is tempted to say, of 
the practical concerns of business, and of the daily 
routine of conventional human intercourse; these 
take on meaning and worth only as in retrospect 
or through anticipation they have some special 
relation to the drama of feeling which is all the 
time steadily moving forward. Of this drama, 
even nature is sensitively aware; the winds have 
echoes of it, and the moon and the stars are curi- 
ously involved in its perturbations. Everywhere 
the tensely vibrating temperament of the feminine 
artist constrains us into moods that are by no 
means those of every day. Of course, there are 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 169 

tracts in lier stories, particularly in Shirley, where 
the friendly commonplaceness of life is nearer 
being recognized, and where the reader conies 
closer to watching and listening with the quiet 
breathing and the half-amused look of one who 
merely observes life's little ironies. But the dis- 
tinctive tone of Miss Bronte's novels, when one 
compares her novels with those of her really great 
contemporaries, is of this irresistibly poignant sort. 
Yet there is in her stories no faring afar into 
the shadowy regions of romance for characters or 
background, and no refining away of the substance 
of life into fantastic dream-shapes and forms. Her 
world has none of the strangeness, the prismatic 
variableness, or the mystical dimness and the fugi- 
tive magic of Poe's world, and none of the alle- 
gorical prescience and duplicity of Hawthorne's 
world. She keeps almost as rigorously within the 
bounds of the possible as literal-minded novelists 
keep ; and she is honestly in love with fact, — 
with what the wrangle of the creative forces of 
nature and society necessitates as opposed to what 
the heart delights to dream. Her world is held 
together by all the great laws that bind into sane 
coherence the physical and the moral world of 
sensible folk. And yet her world is an artificially 
fashioned world, — a world in which a few inter- 
ests rule far more persistently and potently than in 
the world that most men know ; a world in which 
the atoms of fact and incident are wrought into 



170 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

intelligible patterns far more exclusively by the 
pulsing energy of human affections than they are 
in the prosaic world of ordinary events. Not that 
she is a sentimentalist; not that she blinks the 
thwarting forces of nature or the cruel tangles in 
which human wills involve each other. But she 
has magnificent faith in the primal human feelings, 
— above all in passion, — and in their power to 
justify themselves in the midst of all the dul- 
ness, the cruelties, and the tragedies of nature and 
society. In terms of this faith and in harmony 
with this ideal she creates her mimic worlds. She 
is essentially loyal to fact; and yet she finds in 
fact, even in cruel and tragic fact, subtle minis- 
trations to the needs of the human heart. And 
because she is able to convey to her readers her 
peculiar appreciation of the power and the beauty 
of life, with the consummate skill of the artist, 
she belongs with Mrs. Browning among those who 
domicile Eomance in the midst of the dull facts 
of daily life. 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 



The last eighteen months in England have given 
a worthy account of themselves in the matter of 
verse. Within this period two poets of distinction 
have made themselves for the first time really- 
known ; and another poet, who had for an unhappy- 
interval been silent, has returned to the public with 
a volume of verse of undeniable quality. The new- 
comers are, of course, Mr. Francis Thompson and 
Mr. John Davidson; and the poet who returns to 
find his welcome more assured than ever, is, equally 
of course, Mr. William Watson. 

Of the younger generation of verse-writers in 
England, Mr. Watson has, for obvious reasons, 
won the most favour. He has been longest be- 
fore the public, has accustomed the English retina 
to his image, and has lost something of that 
strangeness of aspect which in England so pro- 
vokes distrust. Then he has been able to call Mr. 
Richard Holt Hutton of the Spectator " his friend," 
and has fared sumptuously in that journal after 

1 Written in June, 1895. 
171 



172 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

each of his appearances in print. Of a recent poem 
of Mr. Watson's in the Yellow Book, Mr. Hutton 
has asserted that it contains a symbol that Milton 
never surpassed; and persistently during the last 
year the Spectator has claimed for Mr. Watson the 
right to rank with the greatest English poets. 
Indeed, English critical journals in general have 
received Mr. Watson^s work with a favour that 
begets distrust. And yet it must be admitted that 
his popularity has never been of quite that com- 
promising sort that, for example, has welcomed Mr. 
Lewis Morris, — the God-gifted hand-organ voice of 
England. The eulogists of Mr. Watson have been 
" people of importance " ; people perhaps rather 
official and Academic, not to say priggish, but cer- 
tainly people from whom one differs at one's peril. 
Mr. Watson is a loyal Words worthian, as was 
Matthew Arnold before him, and this fact alone 
is enough to have ensured his acceptance with a 
wide circle of orthodox English readers of poetry. 
Not only are many single poems of Mr. Watson's 
plainly reminiscences of Wordsworth, — as, for ex- 
ample, the poem describing the swans that float into 
view in visionary fashion down the Thames, trailing 
clouds of glory from some unknown, half-mystical 
region, — but Mr. Watson's entire spirit, when he is 
at his best, is undeniably Wordsworth ian. In his 
most characteristic moments, his poetry is an aspi- 
ration toward that mood of passionate calm, of 
perfectly controlled ardour, which Wordsworth of 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 173 

all romantic poets most adequately realized and 
expressed. 

*' 'Tis from those moods in which life stands 
With feet earth-planted, yet with hands 
Stretched toward visionary lands, 

Where vapours lift 
A moment, and aerial strands 

Gleam through the rift, 

" The poet wins, in hours benign, 
At older than the Delphic shrine, 
Those intimations faint and fine, 

To which belongs 
Whatever character divine 

Invests his songs. 

*' And could we live more near allied 
To cloud and mountain, wind and tide, 
Cast this unmeaning coil aside. 

And go forth free, 
The World our goal, Desire our guide, — 

We then might see 

*' Those master moments grow less rare, 
And oftener feel the nameless air 
Come rumouring from we know not where.'* 

The mood pervading these lines is distinctly Words- 
worthian, and it is the mood most frequently found 
in Mr. Watson. Like Wordsworth, he is always 
hearkening for the "intimations" of man's more 
than earthly destiny, but the "intimations" in 
these later days have become sadly attenuated, 
"fainter and finer" than of old; and Mr. Watson's 
account of them lacks the " sober certainty " as well 



174 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

as the spiritual exaltation of Wordsworth's recital, 
despite his loyalty to the Wordsworthian point of 
view. 

But Wordsworth is by no means the only poet 
whose influence is traceable in Mr. Watson's work ; 
echoes of Matthew Arnold may be heard again and 
again. And when one bears these resemblances in 
mind, and remembers also that Mr. Watson has 
given an entire poem to the exceptionally delicate 
and sure appreciation of the best English poets 
in their long succession, one is forced to admit 
that whatever else Mr. Watson may or may not be, 
he is certainly traditional ; he has trained himself 
in the school of the muses; he has formed him- 
self patiently on the best models; he is a loyal 
cherisher of precedent and good example. And 
one is furthermore tempted on to the conclusion 
that in this loyalty to tradition and to precedent 
is to be found the explanation not only of Mr. 
Watson's popularity and of the undeniable beauty 
of much of his verse, but also of what, in the last 
analysis, proves to be the disappointing quality 
of his work as a poet, when judged by exacting 
standards. He has subjected a by no means pow- 
erful genius to a training and discipline that have 
brought him exquisite sureness of taste and deft- 
ness of technique, but have failed to develop real 
richness of nature or any novel or distinctive en- 
visagement of life. He is too much of a poetic 
sacerdotalist ; his authenticity has been his ruiru 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 175 

Mr. Watson is vaingloriously traditional; he has 
the ideal temper for a laureate ; he prides himself 
openly on being heir to a manner and a "mystery." 
His art is intensely sophisticated and almost always 
self-conscious. He even boasts in good, set terms 
that he is a divinely dowered poet. It seems 
strange to find an artist of his unquestionably 
fijie taste including in his last volume verses as 
youthfully self-conscious and arrogant as those on 
Tlie Sovereign Poet : — 

" He sits above the clang and dust of Time, 
With the world's secret trembling on his lip, 
He asks not converse or companionship 
In the cold starlight where thou canst not climb." 

Of course, Mr. Watson's pose is not often so relent- 
less as this, and yet rarely, indeed, is he quite 
unconscious of his mission ; he nearly always wears 
his rue with a difference. 

Traditional, too, are Mr. Watson's motifs; and 
this is something that can less readily be pardoned 
than his traditional manner. In his last volume 
there are few important poems in going over which 
the reader does not feel that he is on familiar 
ground, — ground hallowed by its associations with 
many earlier bards. Not that Mr. Watson does not 
often give us glimpses of beauty for which we have 
to thank primarily his quick poetic eyes ; but the 
regions themselves through which he takes us have 
been for generations sacred to the muses. One of 



176 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

his favourite contrasts is that between the scope 
of human desire and the narrow limits imposed 
upon human destiny. This is the old antinomy 
which has been poetically expounded in countless 
fashions since Byron's day and long before : — 

" But I am fettered to the sod, 

And but forget my bouds an hour ; 
Li amplitude of dreams a god, 
A slave in dearth of power." 

Does not this lament, which the Komanticists and 
the post-Komanticists have for so many years versi- 
fied for us with so many beautiful modulations, 
come to us to-day somewhat belated? So again, 
with the poet's beautifully phrased regret as he 
watches the flight of a lark. 

** Two worlds hast thou to dwell in, Sweet, — 
The virginal untroubled sky, 
And this vext region at my feet. — 
Alas, but one have I ! " 

Here, too, the motif, undeniably beautiful as is 
its expression, is likely to seem a mere reminis- 
cence. Not that the skylark is itself tabooed ; but 
the special symbolism the poet finds in its song 
is perilously near triteness. In recent years, Mr. 
Meredith has heard in the lark's song a more 
modern suggestion. Other motifs which Mr. Wat- 
son elaborates are the sacredness of the poet's 
mission, the tragic solemnity of life, the pathos of 
the waning belief in immortality, the difficulty of 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 177 

escaping from old religious formulas, and regret for 
" the frost-bound, fire-girt scenes of long ago." All 
these themes are eminently proper, but perhaps not 
altogether new. 

Finally, Mr. Watson is inclined to be morbidly 
correct in all his doings and sayings, — in his man- 
ner as well as in his moods. Passionate calm is 
the ideal of the true Wordsworthian ; aspiration 
intense in its visionary grasp of the ideal, but nobly 
restrained in its allegiance to the actual. Unfortu- 
nately, with all Wordsworth's disciples the calm and 
the loyalty to fact have been much easier of emu- 
lation than the transcendental fervour that with 
Wordsworth redeemed and transformed them. In 
Matthew Arnold the loss of fervour was noticeable 
enough, and produced that wanness and anaemic 
pallor that disfigures much of his poetry. In Mr. 
Watson the poet's self-control has become almost 
offensively complete; his face never glows or 
darkens or quivers under the play of passion ; often 
he gives the impression of speaking through a 
mask. 

II 

Quite otherwise is it with the work of Mr. John 
Davidson. To quote from one of his own poems, 
" old and new " are ever " weltering upon the border 
of " his " world." He is above all else modern and 
individual, and the prevailing note of his art is 
restless sincerity. He is the partially articulate 



178 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

bard of a new world in the process of making. 
Doubtless these merits carry with them certain 
countervailing defects. His passion is often turbid 
and uncontrolled, and considering his age — Mr. 
Davidson must now be thirty-five — he still finds 
certain of the commonplace evil tricks of life 
strangely novel and exasperating ; one would think 
that the poet would have sooner grown used to the 
laws of the game. But at any rate he is intensely 
alive; he is "part of all that he has seen" and 
experienced in this age of contending ideals, of 
perishing creeds, and slowly evolving systems. 
Everywhere he grasps uncompromisingly the rudest 
facts of modern civilization, — facts material, in- 
dustrial, social, and religious, — and his imagina- 
tion is, at its best, compelling enough and his power 
of enjoyment, rich enough to enable him to find 
in these forbidding externalities an essential spirit 
of beauty, which he knows words to evoke. The 
stacks of a factory town that "lacquer the sooty 
sky," the shrieks of steam whistles " that pipe the 
morning up before the lark," the telegraph wire 
" taut and lithe, within the wind a core of sound," 
the train, a "monster taught to come to hand 
amain," — these and similar modern corruptions 
because of which Mr. Euskin refuses to be com- 
forted, simply challenge Mr. Davidson's virile imag- 
ination and put it into fierce play in the service of 
a brave love of life. Humanity in all its forms, 
forbidding as well as alluring, sends currents of 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 179 

sympathy through his veins, and sets him to a swift 
fashioning of dramatic scenes and a loving portrayal 
of motive and mood. He has felt the tragic fate of 
the wretchedest of respectabilities, the clerk "at 
thirty bob a week," and has celebrated the courage 
with which this starving victim of the English 
social system suffers stanchly till he falls in his 
place ; it is British pluck in its protoplasmic form 
of which he here sings the praise and illustrates the 
indomitableness. Nothing modern is foreign to Mr. 
Davidson, and some of his best effects are secured 
from the most sordid material. 

In his relation to religion, Mr. Davidson is also 
"modern"; but here the peculiar form of his 
modernity is hardly so attractive. Some one has 
dubbed him, because of his treatment of religious 
themes, "the man who dares." But his daring 
seems to many to be rather uninstructed and 
flaunting. In his Exodus from Houndsditch, for 
example, he describes a wild phantasmagoria of 
woe, — " women on fire ! and tortured girls and 
boys!" — and attributes all the suffering, with no 
hint of compensating good, to the Christian religion. 
This utterly unhistorical conception is the favour- 
ite one with those who have been used to look 
up to the late Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Ingersoll 
as men of light and leading, but seems a bit sur- 
prising in a man of Mr. Davidson's literary attain- 
ments. In Tlie Ballad in Blank Verse of the 
Making of a Poet, religion is assailed with the 



180 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

same virulence ; the severities and strenuous spiritu- 
ality of Christianity are contrasted in true Swin- 
burnian fashion with the luxuriant beauty and 
frank, sensuous splendour of Hellenism : ultimately, 
however, the poet turns from both Christianity and 
modern Paganism to what seems to him a still more 
modern mood, in which he gives over the attempt 
to formulate truth, whether religious or moral, and 
accepts all life indifferently as worthy of passionate 
sympathy and imaginative expression. 

" No creed for me ! I am a man apart : 
A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world ; 
A soulless life that angels may possess 
Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things 
May loll at ease beside the loveliest ; 
A martyr for all mundane moods to tear." 

Surely, this is a shallow and ranting account of 
the irresponsibility of the artist; it is dilettant- 
ism " without the manner's charm," — dilettantism 
grown violent and raucous. Not in these poems, 
nor indeed in any of his poems, does Mr. Davidson 
show that he has done much thinking or got at 
what life means except as far as his senses or his 
feelings can tell him. 

In still another way religion enters often into Mr. 
Davidson's poetry. He is fond of using the sym- 
bols, the names, the terms of Christianity for purely 
decorative effect. In his Ballad of Heaven and 
his Ballad of Hell and Ballad of a Nun Satan, 
the Virgin Mary, and even God the Father appear 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 181 

as actors. Yet the action is always palpably 
make-believe; the stories exist solely as stories, 
and have at the utmost merely an allegorical 
value. The strange point is to find this tendency 
to treat Christianity as a beautiful myth existing 
side by side with such intense hatred of the system 
as Mr. Davidson elsewhere expresses, and also side 
by side with such ethical sincerity as he shows in 
much of his writing. In Dante Gabriel Eossetti's 
poetry, also, Christianity fades into a series of 
beautiful myths ; but it suffers this transformation, 
only with everything else that enters the " dream- 
land vaporous and unaccountable" of Eossetti's 
mind. Eossetti never cares for anything outside 
his dream. Mr. Davidson sympathizes intensely 
with the feelings of all those whose world he 
shares ; hence the strangeness of finding so vital a 
system as Christianity, becoming to him merely a 
means of fitting himself out with the paraphernalia 
of art. 

And yet, after all, coherence is not specially the 
habit of Mr. Davidson's mind. In his narrative 
poems he carries to its extreme the balladist's right 
to move by leaps and bounds. In the Ballad of a 
Nun the action is only sublimated hysteria, and the 
actors. Virgin Mary and all, are merely irrespon- 
sible degenerates. Doubtless the moral of this 
Ballad and of the Ballads of Heaven and of Hell, 
is Love Triumphant. But to the prosaic mind 
Love as hymned by this very modern poet of the 



182 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

London streets seems rather a destroyer tlian a 
saviour or regenerator. Love helps Mr. David- 
son's heroes and heroines to go through some very- 
picturesque paroxysms, and there the matter ends. 
When all is said, however, Mr. Davidson's work 
has an intense vitality that justifies it in spite of 
minor faults. Such a poem as the Ballad in Blank 
Verse pulses with the poet's blood from the first 
line to the last. Mr. Davidson lives in his poetry 
from moment to moment with a passion and a 
fierceness of conception and an intimacy of relation 
to the facts of the time that can hardly be matched 
in any of the younger poets. 

III. 

To Mr. Francis Thompson we certainly must not 
look for any similar valorous attempt to bring all 
life within our scope and to find everywhere aspects 
of beauty. Not that he does not offer us beauty 
abundantly and unstintedly. Whatever is within 
the range of his sympathy, whatever kindles his 
imagination, forthwith becomes in his verse mysti- 
cally beautiful beyond anything that Mr. Watson 
or Mr. Davidson has power to produce. But his 
spirit lives within a magic crystal sphere, which 
gives entrance to but few of the commonplace 
objects of modern life and holds afar, dimly in- 
effectual, its crass immediacy and bewildering 
insistence of appeal, and its coarse and glaring 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 183 

disorder. It is as the poet of an inviolate region 
of intense personal emotion that Mr. Thompson is 
specially distinguished. 

Mr. Thompson's rhythms are much subtler and 
more varied and vital than those of our other two 
poets and mark him at once as preeminently a 
singer. Mr. Davidson in Ballads and Songs never 
escapes from iambics, and Mr. Watson in his last 
volume exchanges them only once for measures 
of another kind. Mr. Thompson's poetry is not 
simply rich in trochaic and anapaestic and dactylic 
measures, but is full of the most delicate metrical 
nuances, where from phrase to phrase, and verse to 
verse, the rhythm vibrates more slowly or swiftly 
in intimate response to the play of feeling and 
imagination. 

Mr. Watson's verse is "frozen music"; Mr. 
Thompson's, the exquisitely modulated utterance 
of a flexible, vibrant voice. In his poetry, words 
lose their hard, individual outlines ; speech is no 
longer merely a series of conventional signs which 
are put together mechanically in accordance with 
recognized laws ; sound becomes a new art medium, 
created from moment to moment, continuous in its 
subtle effects of contrast and correspondence, end- 
lessly suggestive in its changing tone-colours and 
emotional perturbations, magical and inexplicable 
in its power to transfer a new mood from the heart 
of the poet, the master of moods, to the heart of 
the reader. This is, of course, what language be- 



184 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

comes in the poetry of every great artist; but in 
the poetry of Mr. Thompson, far more impressively 
than in that of most modern versifiers, language 
undergoes this imaginative regeneration or re- 
creation, and becomes vitally suggestive in number- 
less novel ways. He is less at the mercy of indi- 
vidual words than either Mr. Davidson or Mr. 
Watson; he works in larger sound-masses, and 
confers upon sound a subtler and more penetrat- 
ing symbolic suggestiveness. These phases of his 
genius can hardly be illustrated by means of ex- 
tracts ; yet some glimpses of the music and beauty 
of his verse may be caught from a stanza or two of 
The Making of Viola. 

I. 

The Father of Heaven. 

" Spin, daughter Mary, spin, 
Twirl your wheel with silver din ; 
Spin, daughter Mary, spin, 
Spin a tress for Viola." 
Angels. 

" Spin, Queen Mary, a 
Brown tress for Viola." 

II. 

The Father of Heaven. 

" Weave, hands angelical, 
"Weave a woof of flesh to pall — 
Weave, hands angelical — 
Flesh to pall our Viola." 
Angels. 

" Weave, singing brothers, a 
Velvet flesh for Viola." 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 185 

And so the verses go on, tremulously tender in 
their modulations and evanescent in their shifting 
tone-colours, through their archaic progressions of 
harmony. Much simpler, but in its own way 
equally suggestive, is the music of the first of 
the Poems on Children : — 

" Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face I 
She gave me tokens three : 
A look, a word of her winsome mouth, 
And a wild raspberry. 

*' A berry red, a guileless look, 

A still word, — strings of sand I 
And yet they made my wild, wild heart 
Fly down to her little hand. 

*• For standing artless as the air, 
And candid as the skies, 
She took the berries with her hand, 
And the love with her sweet eyes. 



" She looked a little wistfully, 
Then went her sunshine way : 
The sea's eye had a mist on it. 
And the leaves fell from the day.'* 

Such delicate and airily drifting effects, however, 
are only a small part of those that Mr. Thompson 
is master of. His richer and more intricate har- 
monies are to be found in A Judgment in Heaven, 
To Monica Thought Dying, and TJie Hound of 
Heaven. For breadth and splendour of metrical 



186 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

effect, varied with delicate interludes of quieter 
beauty, The Hound of Heaven is not to be matched 
in recent years, except in the volumes of Mr. 
Swinburne; and it has a sincerity and undecora- 
tive truth of tone, that Mr. Swinburne's verse 
is apt to lack. A Judgment in Heaven also is 
remarkable for its metrical audacity ; in elaborate- 
ness of rhythm and gorgeousness of tonal effects 
it suggests the methods and colour-schemes of the 
most picturesque modern orchestral pieces. 

A Judgment in Heaven calls up at once the 
charge so often urged against Mr. Thompson, that 
he is affected and artificial. Without doubt, certain 
of his poems are curiously reminiscent of the Meta- 
physical Poets, — of Donne and of Cowley. In 
Her Portrait, for example, mediaeval essences and 
abstractions, of the kind that abound in the 
works of poets for whom scholastic theology was 
more than a name, are oddly in evidence, and we 
hear a great deal of such entities as " encumbering 
virility," "loveliness corporeal," "prison of femi- 
neity," and so on. The mythology, too, and the 
decorative allusions in such poems are continually 
Biblical and add to the mediaeval effect ; the inge- 
nuity of the play with imagery is often of Cowleian 
quaintness or has the wayward splendour and subtle 
suggestiveness of Donne. 

"God laid his fingers on the ivories 
Of her pure members as on smoothed keys, 
And there out-breathed her spirit's harmonies." 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 187 

The delight in conceits and in a strange, tricksy 
manipulation of words recalls the manner of the 
seventeenth century poets : — 

♦' Herself must with herself be sole compeer, 
Unless the people of her distant sphere 
Some gold migration send to melodise the year. 
But first our hearts must burn in larger guise, 
To reformate the uncharitable skies, 
And so the deathless plumage to acclimatise." 

For a few readers even the super-subtlety and the 
wilful over-refinement of such passages will have 
an archaic charm ; but it should be noted that this 
mannerism almost disappears in the later poems of 
the volume. 

On the other hand, ornateness of phrasing, a cer- 
tain ventriloquence of style, an attempt to gain 
impressiveness for the voice by making it reverber- 
ate through high-sounding words from an undeter- 
mined distance, — this remains characteristic of Mr. 
Thompson even in some of his very latest poems. 
In A Judgment in Heaven, for example, he describes 
''a grisly jaw" of clouds "whose verges support- 
lessly congest with fire, and suddenly spit forth 
the moon.'* We feel like exclaiming with Maria 
in Twelfth Night, — "Lo, how hollow the fiend 
speaks within him." Yet even in such passages 
there is something more than grandiloquent dic- 
tion; there is always rich imagery, faithfully con- 
ceived, though perhaps needlessly elaborated and 
over-ornamental. Moreover, the imagery is vital 



188 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

and novel, and not of a conventional pattern like 
that into which another great master of language, 
Mr. Swinburne, is sometimes betrayed. Although 
Mr. Thompson is doubtless a virtuoso of the dic- 
tionary, and at times seems simply exhibiting his 
technical command of its pages, yet in fact his 
imagination in nearly every case keeps pace with 
his phrasing, and his radical fault in showy pas- 
sages is, perhaps, after all not so much luxuriance 
of language as extravagance of imagery. 

As a seer of visions Mr. Thompson is by all odds 
the greatest of the younger poets. His imagination 
is far-ranging in its scope, intensely brilliant in its 
colouring, and penetrative and renovating in its 
interpretations. Interstellar distances and celestial 
magnitudes do not daunt him more than they 
daunted Shelley ; "the blue regions of the air" and 
the " planetary wheelings " of the heavens are 
known to him in all their vicissitudes, and haunt 
his imagination with their symbolic suggestions. 
He has himself rather daringly described with a 
phrase and an image the flashing scope of his vision 
and the range and strength of his imagination, 
where in The Hound of Heaven he speaks of 

*'The linked fantasies in whose blossomy twist 
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist." 

The hyperbole, audacious as it is, does not seem 
beyond bounds as one reads Mr. Thompson's most 
characteristic poems and follows the rapid and sure 



THREE LYRICAL MODES 189 

questing of his imagination. Not since Shelley has 
imagery had a finer cosmic scope and magnificence 
of colour than in the following passages : — 

*'I dimly guess what time in mists confounds ; 
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds 
From the hid battlements of Eternity, 
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then 
Round the half -glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.'* 

****** 

" The calm hour strikes on yon golden gong, 
In tones of floating and mellow light 
A spreading summons to even-song : 
See how there 
The cowl6d night 
Kneels on the Eastern sanctuary stair. 
What is this feel of incense everywhere ? 
Clings it round folds of the blanch-amiced clouds, 

Upwafted by the solemn thurifer. 
The mighty spirit unknown, 
That swingeth earth before the embannered Throne ? " 

****** 
♦' This labouring, vast, Tellurian galleon. 
Riding at anchor off the orient sun. 
Had broken its cable, and stood out to space 
Down some frore Arctic of the aerial ways : 
And now, back warping from the inclement main. 
Its vaporous shroudage drenched with icy rain. 
It swung into its azure roads again ; 
When, floated on the prosperous sun-gale, you 
Lit, a white halcyon auspice, 'mid our frozen crew." 

The unconscious courage of such passages as these, 
their successful audacity, their adequacy of vision, 
imaginative integrity, and largeness of utterance, 



190 THREE LYRICAL MODES 

above all the unhalting and inborn ease of manner 
with which great things are wrought before our 
eyes, compel recognition of Mr. Thompson's origi- 
nality and power as a creative artist. 

In the intensity and the quality of his passion, as 
well as in the scope and vividness of his imagina- 
tion, Mr. Thompson is, among the younger poets of 
to-day, preeminent. Mr. Watson, when compared 
with him, is wan and conventional, and Mr. David- 
son turbulent and murky. The magnifying and 
transforming power of passion, its way of exalting 
or intensifying trifles till they overshadow the soul 
intolerably or pierce it irreparably, has rarely been 
better portrayed than in the poem To Monica 
Thought Dying. The quaint words that the child 
had last used in whimsical comradeship with her 
older friend, become in the poet's mind a haunting 
refrain, tragic because of its incommensurability 
with the passion of grief that he now tries to 
express. One would almost have to go to King 
Lear for a like terrible transformation of " child- 
ish babble" and a like overwhelming contrast be- 
tween the trivial and the tragic. Yet the tone is 
throughout restrained, despite the passion and the 
strenuous sweep of the verse. There is no turbu- 
lence, no confusion of tongues, no blurring of out- 
lines or shattering of imagery. The world is the 
world of plastic imagination, where even the most 
forbidding shapes and awful presences of life grow 
*^ beautiful through love." 



THEEE LYRICAL MODES 191 

Beauty, indeed, is the one word with which to 
greet and to take leave of Mr. Thompson's poetry. 
Not that he belongs among those who divorce art 
from life, and seek beauty in disregard of all else. 
Neither in mood nor in treatment is he to be classed 
with the devotees of art for art's sake. His poetry 
emancipates and strengthens, whereas theirs un- 
nerves, and is evermore " wreathing a flowery band 
to bind us to the earth." He gives us the piercing 
bitter-sweet of myrrh, "like a sorrow having 
wings," in place of the languorous perfumes of 
nard of which their verses are redolent. Beauty 
there everywhere is in his poetry : but it is beauty 
spiritual as well as sensuous ; beauty quintessential, 
primordial, regenerative; beauty that stings the 
spirit into keener activity and more passionate 
aspiration. 



TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC ^ 

In March, 1857, Sainte-Beuve devoted two of his 
Causeries du Lundi to the discussion of Divers 
Merits de M. H. Taine. He chose for special analy- 
sis Taine's Essai sur Tite-Live, his Doctor's thesis 
on La Fontaine, which was later enlarged and 
republished, and his Philosophes dassiques du 
XIX' siMe. Taine had taken his Doctor's de- 
gree only four years before, but he had marked 
each succeeding year with a work of first-rate im- 
portance ; he had also published from time to time 
noteworthy essays on such widely different sub- 
jects as Xenophon, Saint-Simon, Guizot, and Mme. 
de la Fayette. In all these treatises and essays 
the comparatively unknown author had pleaded for 
and illustrated new methods and new aims in liter- 
ary criticism, and despite his youth and inexpe- 
rience and venturesomeness, his work had shown 
none of the tentativeness or the weakness of first 
experiments. It became plainer with each pub- 
lication that the new critic was a man of genu- 
ine power and originality ; and Sainte-Beuve, with 
characteristic grace and generosity, made haste to 
welcome him. 

1 Published in the Nation, on Taine's death, in 1893. 
192 



TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 193 

There is something almost dramatic in this first 
encounter between the two critics. Sainte-Beuve 
was the representative of the old tradition in criti- 
cism, while Taine was confessedly an innovator. 
The idealists and the Romanticists who fared so ill 
at the hands of Taine, had many of them been per- 
sonal friends of Sainte-Beuve. The idealistic tra- 
dition in literature with which Sainte-Beuve cer- 
tainly sympathized, however completely he had rid 
himself of early romantic illusions, was the special 
object of Taine's contempt and ridicule. Again, 
Sainte-Beuve was the literary critic pure and sim- 
ple ; he had coquetted, it is true, with science, but 
he had never let his coquetries pass beyond the 
bounds of decorum or affect his professional work. 
Now it was on science that Taine's whole method 
was founded ; his terminology was drawn from sci- 
ence, and it was in the name of science that he 
came forward to reform literary criticism. There- 
fore, if Sainte-Beuve had in his favour the prestige 
of a great tradition, Taine on his side had the pres- 
tige of a popular catchword, for just at this time 
science was the cry of the hour, and realism was 
revenging itself for the romantic excesses of 1830. 

Of the tact and skill with which, under these 
rather exacting conditions, Saint-Beuve acquits 
himself, there can be but one opinion: they are 
worthy of the great apostle of good taste. He rec- 
ognizes at once Taine's scholarship, his curious ma- 
turity, his sureness of touch, his certainty of aim 



194 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 

and of method. He speaks pleasantly of the duty 
that older men owe to such juniors as really 
" count " — that of scanning them well and coming 
to know them thoroughly. Moreover, to have to 
do with these newest arrivals tends to make you 
young again, even though the new-comers show 
their youth only by their vigour, and present them- 
selves before you full-grown and full-armed. But 
it behoves you to be on your guard and to tighten 
your belt as you approach them. 

After this gracious and generous greeting, Sainte- 
Beuve goes on to make some very searching strict- 
ures on Taine's ideas and methods. Under guise 
of a tribute to Taine's thoroughness and scholar- 
ship, he at once suggests the points in which, he 
thinks, Taine most offends against the spirit and 
the ideals of good criticism. Taine is too desper- 
ately serious : he has the set look and the business- 
like bearing of a man in a laboratory, who handles 
hot crucibles and deals with dangerous compounds. 
And again, he is too disputatious: he is always 
bent on proving a thesis ; the air of the Sorbonne 
lecture-rooms clings about his volumes. These 
faults of bearing are for Sainte-Beuve significant of 
radical defects of temperament and of method. 
Taine does not put himself in touch with his 
author ; he does not enter sympathetically into the 
spirit of the work he criticises ; he uses his author 
for his own special purposes ; he wrests his author's 
ideas into illustrations of his own pet theories j or, 



TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 195 

as Sainte-Beuve elsewhere puts it, the critic pulls 
the blankets all to his side of the bed. 

These charges — though charges is too harsh and 
criminating a word for the suave insinuations of 
Sainte-Beuve — take up a large part of the first 
essay. But here and there in the first essay, and 
at still greater length in the second essay, Sainte- 
Beuve adopts a different point of view, and with 
admirable ingenuity turns Taine's own principles 
against Taine himself. The sum and substance of 
the earlier criticisms was that Taine was not an 
" appreciator," but a scientific student of literary 
forms and an historian of ideas ; Sainte-Beuve's 
quarrel was with Taine's whole ideal. The later 
criticisms suggest that Taine is false to his own 
ideal ; that while he is professing to reform liter- 
ary criticism in the name of science and to put it 
on a scientific basis, he is continually violating the 
laws of science and departing from the methods of 
scientific investigation. He is too much of a sys- 
tematizer and too ambitious in his ideal construc- 
tions ; he is impatient of doubt or uncertainty, and 
forges links out of nothing wherever there are 
breaks in the chain of his evidence. In attempting 
to sum up an individual under a formula, he sins 
against science, by disregarding the infinite com- 
plexity of the problem and by using rough-and- 
ready methods for solving it. Before " talents " or 
characters can be classed or grouped under formu- 
las, an almost endless series of observations must 



196 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 

be made on all kinds of men and under a vast 
variety of conditions ; to attempt to frame out 
of hand a few cheap formulas for typical characters 
is a radically unscientific mode of procedure. 

By some of Sainte-Beuve's suggestions Taine un- 
doubtedly profited ; in his subsequent work, he in- 
sists less dogmatically on the significance of ^'7a 
facultd maltresse " and on the possibility of finding 
a single phrase by which to sum up an individual 
in a formula. The parable of Adam naming the 
beasts of the field at the behest of the Lord had 
had its effect. Taine's love of system, however, 
and his general methods of work remained un- 
changed. He was still invariably bent on proving 
a thesis, and he was as far as ever from being sat- 
isfied, after the manner of impressionistic critics, 
with merely dabbling in the standing pool of his 
feelings. Of the importance of method in the 
study of literature and of the value of his own 
method in its main features, he was as firmly con- 
vinced as ever ; and his next great work, his His- 
toire de la litterature anglaise, published in 1864, 
was constructed from first to last in illustration of 
his method and in obedience to his principles. In 
fact, the possibility of a scientific explanation of 
literature was the specific thesis which in this case 
Taine nailed up to be proved, and his History of 
English Literature was merely the four volume 
demonstration of a thirty-page theorem. 

Certainly this work of Taine's must always 



TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 197 

stand as a superb tour de force. It is easy enougli 
to carp at it ; to disagree with this or that estimate ; 
to blame the critic for overrating Byron and for 
doing scant justice to Shelley; to exclaim at the 
yeoman's service exacted from a few such terms as 
Berserker rage, Puritan cant, English stolidity ; to 
mock at French prejudice, and to accuse the critic 
of being mechanical and hard and unsympathetic, 
of turning everything into demonstration, and of 
being hypnotized by a theory. But, after the bit- 
terest possible things have been said, it still 
remains true that the History is a magnificent 
achievement and a work of the greatest possible 
significance. Merely as a piece of literary engi- 
neering, it is a marvel of skill : its books, its chap- 
ters, and its sections are massed with a sure eye 
both for literary effect and for sequences of 
thought; and the table of contents alone is more 
stimulating reading than the texts of most histo- 
ries of English literature. But, of course, what 
makes the book unique is its thoroughgoing 
attempt to explain a whole literature in terms 
of national character, inherited culture, and 
environment. 

Not that the underlying principle on which 
Taine's method depends had not been enunciated 
long before. That principle is, of course, the his- 
toric continuity and the organic unity of national 
life; and for the earliest suggestion of that prin- 
ciple and the earliest development of a method 



198 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 

somewhat in harmony with it, we should have to 
go back at least to Taine's great countryman, Mon- 
tesquieu, whose Esprit des Lois was a more or 
less conscious attempt to find in all a nation's insti- 
tutions and activities the expression of one mould- 
ing and guiding spirit. Later on, in the eighteenth 
century, the principle was grasped at least partially 
by Winckelmann, whose Geschichte der Kunst des 
AUerthums (1764) recognized the relativity of the 
arts, and the essential and necessary connection 
between the life of a people and its art- expression. 
It was Herder, however, who first realized all that 
the principle involved, and undertook to apply it 
systematically and in detail to the study of litera- 
ture. Literary criticism, in passing into his hands 
from those of Lessing, was totally changed in 
scope, methods, and aims; it no longer sought to 
appraise the aesthetic value of pieces of literature 
according as they met or fell short of the abstract 
requirements of ideal standards; it studied litera- 
ture historically, and regarded it as necessarily de- 
termined in form and in matter through its direct 
relation to the life of the people for whom and by 
whom it was produced. This conception of litera- 
ture as an organic growth was one of the best gifts 
of Herder to Goethe, and from their day to our 
own it has been a commonplace of German literary 
criticism. 

It is not, then, because of the originality of his 
fundamental principle that Taine's History of 



TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 199 

English Literature is so important and significant 
a book. But nowhere else, unless in Scherer's 
GescJiichte der Deutschen Literatur, has the prin- 
ciple in question been applied so brilliantly for the 
explanation of a whole national literature. The 
magnitude of the attempt, the importance of the 
subject, and the brilliancy of the execution, have 
insured the book a great vogue; and to-day, for 
most English readers, Taine stands as the one 
great representative of scientific method in the 
study of literature. Taine's work has done more 
to popularize the conception of literature as the 
direct and necessary expression of national life 
than all the numberless tomes of conscientious 
German philosophizing. 

Then, again, Taine's theory, from its union of ap- 
parent simplicity and comprehensiveness, is always 
at first sight enormously taking, and seems to 
offer a perfect organon for the study of literature. 
With characteristic love of clearness, precision, 
and system, Taine tried to find a few ultimate 
forces in terms of which to express all the infi- 
nitely various influences that shape and colour na- 
tional life and determine its form and content. 
The result of this effort was his adoption of the 
now well-known categories, race, moment, and 
milieu. The thoroughness and the skill with which 
the influence of these ultimate forces is traced out 
in all the minor groups of social facts, in religion, 
philosophy, art, and science, are bound to be capti- 



200 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 

vating, particularly to young students who are 
hungry for generalizations and eager to impose 
themselves on the facts they handle. Perhaps the 
value of Taine's theory then depends fully as much 
on its stimulating power as on any absolute cer- 
tainty that can be claimed either for its subordi- 
nate principles or for the conclusions to which it 
leads. 

Attacks on the theory have from the first been 
plentiful. Among comparatively recent criticisms 
that of M. £mile Hennequin in La Critique scien- 
tifique is most interesting and suggestive. M. 
Hennequin appeared as a champion of " the great 
man" in history and literature. Under Taine's 
treatment "the great man" seemed in danger of 
being ruthlessly and prematurely resolved into his 
elements ; M. Hennequin was bent on rescuing him 
and reconstituting him at any cost. "The great 
man," he insists, is not the product of his age ; he 
fashions his age in his own image. He creates out 
of nothing a beautiful ideal, either of action or of 
passion, and imposes it on his sympathetic, impres- 
sionable, but uncreative contemporaries. He can- 
not be the mere product of his age, for both he and 
his very opposite may exist under precisely the 
same social conditions. Goethe and Schiller be- 
longed to one and the same nation in one and the 
same age; so also with Hobbes and Milton, with 
Byron and Crabbe, with Scott and Landor, and 
with a host of other ill-mated couples, whom M. 



TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 201 

Hennequin holds up to view for the bewilderment 
of the faithful followers of Taine. The great man, 
then, is not the product of his age, but is a mys- 
terious original force, out of all explicable relation 
to his time, except as he brings his time under the 
spell of his genius. 

It is, of course, not at all difficult to see how all 
this can be met from Taine's point of view; the 
criticism, though clever, is not damaging or convinc- 
ing. But certain conclusions that M. Hennequin 
draws from this form of the great-man theory are 
interesting to the literary critic because of their 
practical applications. Society, M. Hennequin in- 
sists, can properly be studied only through its typ- 
ical great men, whose ideals dominate various 
social groups, and whose temperaments are their 
followers' temperaments intensified and magnified. 
Now, for the successful study of these typical tem- 
peraments, we must have, M. Hennequin urges, a 
thorough and elaborate system of psychological 
analysis, with points of view, methods, and terms 
which shall be used in common by all critics. This 
plea for cooperation among all critics in the thor- 
ough and systematic study of temperaments seems 
wholly in Taine's spirit, and suggests certain lines 
along which Taine's method can profitably be sup- 
plemented. 

Such a scheme for the scientific study of the 
temperaments of authors, M. Hennequin, indeed, 
with a courage that may very well have come from 



202 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 

youth, and inexperience, tried to outline. It is easy 
for the ill-disposed to scoff at his elaborately deter- 
mined points of view, at his ingenious terminology, 
and at his formal schedules of facts and conclu- 
sions. But it is, nevertheless, perfectly plain that 
some such, scheme must be devised and put into 
practice if criticism is ever to become a science, as 
Taine and his followers have always been bent 
upon making it. Moreover, Taine himself recog- 
nized this need with perfect distinctness. In the 
eighth section of the introduction to his History 
of English Literature he writes : " There is a par- 
ticular system of inner impressions and operations 
which makes an artist, a believer, a musician, a 
painter, a man in a nomadic or social state ; and of 
each the birth and growth, the connection of ideas 
and emotions, are different; each has his moral his- 
tory and his special structure, with some govern- 
ing disposition and some dominant feature. To 
explain each, it would be necessary to write a 
chapter of psychological analysis, and barely yet 
has such a method been rudely sketched." This 
passage may well enough have given M. Henne- 
quin the first hint for his scheme of psychological 
analysis. 

Taine never for a moment claimed completeness 
or finality for his method. He knew far better 
than his assailants the difficulty of his problems, 
and the necessary imperfections of any method 
that can yet be devised for dealing with them. 



TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 203 

But " his faith was large in time " and in the ulti- 
mate outcome of the cooperation of many ardent 
students along the lines he had sketched. In 1866, 
in his preface to Essais de critique et dliistoire, 
he writes of the science of history: "Tel est le 
champ qui lui est ouvert; il n'a pas de limites; 
dans un pareil domain e, tous les efforts d'un 
homme ne peuvent le porter en avant que d'un ou 
deux pas ; il observe un petit coin, puis un autre ; 
de temps en temps il s'arrete pour indiquer la voie 
qui lui semble la plus courte et la plus sure. C'est 
tout ce que j 'essay e de faire: le plus vif plaisir 
d'un esprit qui travaille consiste dans la pensee du 
travail que les autres feront plus tard." This pas- 
sage contains the quintessence of Taine's spirit — 
his generosity in appreciating the work of others, 
his faith in the future, his indomitable energy, 
and his enthusiastic devotion to the task in hand. 
In his article on that prince of amateurs. Prosper 
Merimee, he says of the need of fixity of purpose 
and of concentration : " Un homme ne produit tout 
ce dont il est capable que lorsque, ayant conqu 
quelque forme d'art, quelque methode de science, 
bref, quelque idee generale, il la trouve si belle 
qu'il la prefere a tout, notamment a lui-m§me, et 
I'adore comme une deesse qu'il est trop heureux de 
servir." This fine singleness of purpose and stren- 
uousness of pursuit characterizes all Taine's work 
in literature. The great debt we owe to his schol- 
arship and to his philosophic insight is too con- 



204 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CEITIC 

stantly in our minds to need to find its way often 
into speech ; but perhaps we are not so apt to real- 
ize how much he has done to redeem literary criti- 
cism from being a paltry juggling with fine 
phrases and to give it seriousness of purpose, dig- 
nity, and a recognized standing. He was charged 
with thorough-going materialism ; but in an age of 
decadence, when the descendants of the Eomanti- 
cists and idealists are for the most part engaged in 
dilettante experiments on their senses and emo- 
tions, . such materialism as Taine's is as healthy as 
sea air. It is no wonder that when the death of 
M. Taine was announced, many students of litera- 
ture felt as if they had lost a personal friend. 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIA- 
TION 

Pure impressionism in literary criticism has of 
late years grown into great favour, both among 
critics themselves and with the public. The essen- 
tials of a good critic — so the rubric has come to 
run — are sensitiveness to the varying appeal of 
art, and the ability to translate this appeal into 
images and phrases. The impressionist must have 
delicacy of perception, mobility of mood, reverence 
for the shade, and a sure instinct for the specific 
integrating phrase, and for the image tinged with 
feeling. 

The popular legend that places Matthew Arnold 
at the head of this critical tradition in England is 
at least partly true; he certainly cared more for 
the shade and sought more patiently to define it, 
than any earlier English critic. The cult of the 
shade was one of the many good things that came to 
him from Erance. But Arnold the critic was no 
match for Arnold the foe of Philistinism. Though 
he had early insisted on the need of detachment in 
literary criticism, Arnold suffered his moods to be 
perturbed and his temperament to be blurred by 
206 



206 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

worry over practical and public questions of the 
hour; and in later years he grew so intent on 
coaching his fellow-countrymen in morals and 
religion as to lose in some degree his critical zest 
for refinements that had no direct ethical value. 
It is rather to Walter Pater among English essay- 
ists that the modern impressionist looks for precept 
and example in his search for disinterestedness, for 
artistic sincerity, and for flexibleness of tempera- 
ment; and it is Pater who, more than all other 
English critics, has illustrated what appreciative 
criticism may accomplish. 

Yet if we consider the matter more carefully, 
impressionism is neither Arnold's nor Pater's 
importation or invention. It is the result of far 
deeper influences than any one man could have put 
in play. It is indeed the expression in literature 
of certain spiritual tendencies that have long been 
developing, — tendencies the growth of which may 
be traced in man's relation to nature as well as to 
art. And it is because the moods and the instincts 
and the methods of impressionism may thus be 
discovered working themselves out connectedly 
and progressively in the history of the human 
spirit, that they must be regarded as justifying 
themselves, and as deserving from even the most 
conservative judges some degree of recognition and 
acceptance. Little by little, during the last two 
centuries, the human spirit has gained a finer and 
closer sense of the worth and meaning of every 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 207 

individual moment of pleasure in the presence alike 
of nature and of art. The record of this increase 
of sensitiveness toward nature is to be found in 
poetry, and toward art in criticism. 

Thomson's Seasons may be taken as represent- 
ing the utmost sensitiveness to nature of which 
the early eighteenth century was capable. Even 
for a modern reader, Thomson's descriptions 
still have considerable charm ; but what such 
a reader soon notes is that the effects Thomson 
portrays are all generalized effects, grouped sig- 
nificantly under the names of the four seasons. 
Typical spring, typical summer, and so on — 
these Thomson portrays, and of these he feels 
what may be called the generalized emotional 
value. Beyond this typical treatment of na- 
ture and these generalized emotions he does 
not pass. As we go on, however, through the 
poetry of the century, nature becomes gradually 
more localized; poets dare to mark with specific 
detail — to picture vividly — individual objects, 
and they feel, and set down in their verse, the 
general charm that this landscape, this smiling 
valley, or this brimming river, has for an impres- 
sionable observer. Cowper has thus recorded much 
of the beauty of the valley of the Ouse, with deli- 
cate truth and finished art. Yet, be it noted, he 
has included in his record little or no suggestion of 
his own peculiar momentary moods. In Words- 
worth and the Eomantic poets, the impressions 



208 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

of nature are still further defined — are individual- 
ized both in place and in time; at last we have 
"the time and the place and the loved one all 
together." Continually, in Eomantic poetry, a 
special bit of nature, tinged with the colour of a 
fleeting mood, is enshrined in verse; the fusion 
of nature with man's spirit is relatively com- 
plete. 

In criticism, too, — that is, in man's conscious 
relation to art, — a similar growth in sensitiveness 
and in concreteness of matter and mood may be 
traced. Addison was the first to try to work out, 
in his Pleasures of the Imagination, the psychology 
of artistic enjoyment; and his papers on Paradise 
Lost come nearer being patient and vital apprecia- 
tion of literature than any earlier English criticism 
comes. Yet, after all, they get little beyond a 
conventional and general classification of impres- 
sions. Addison's words of praise and blame are 
few, literal, abstract, colourless. "Just," "natu- 
ral," "elegant," "beautiful," " wonderfully beauti- 
ful and poetical" — these words and phrases, and 
others like them, are used again and again; and 
rarely indeed does Addison escape from such tag- 
ging generalities, and define a personal impression 
vividly and imaginatively. The history of literary 
criticism from Addison's day to our own is, if 
viewed in one way, the history of the ever-increas- 
ing refinement of the critic's sensorium; it is the 
history of the critic's increasing sensitiveness to 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 209 

delicate shades of spiritual experience in his reac- 
tion on literature; and finally, it is the history of 
a growing tendency on the part of the critic to 
value, above all else, his own intimate personal 
relation to this or that piece of literature — a 
tendency that more and more takes the form of 
prizing the fleeting mood, the passing poignant 
moment of enjoyment in the presence of art, 
until at last certain modern critics refuse, on prin- 
ciple, to feel twice alike about the same poem. In 
short, what has occurred is this : a poem in its re- 
lation to the critic has been gradually carried over 
from the outside world and made an intimate part 
of the critic's personality; it has been transformed 
from an external object, loosely related to univer- 
sal mind and generalized emotion of which the 
critic stands as type, into a series of thought-waves 
and nerve-vibrations that run at a special moment 
through an active brain and a sensitive tempera- 
ment. For the pre- Addisonian critic, a poem was 
something to be scanned and handled, like an 
exquisite casket, and to be praised in general terms 
for its conventional design, its ingenious setting 
of jewel-like ornaments, and its sure and skilful 
execution; for the modern impressionistic critic, it 
is like the tone of a dear voice, like the breath of 
early morning, like any intangible greeting that 
steals across the nerves and cherishes them with an 
intimately personal appeal. 

Impressionism, then, justifies itself historically. 



210 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

But more than this, it justifies itself psychologi- 
cally; for it recognizes with peculiar complete- 
ness the vitalizing power of literature — its fashion 
of putting into play the whole nature of each 
reader it addresses and its consequent, unlimited, 
creative energy. A piece of scientific writing offers 
to every man the same studiously unequivocal 
message; as far as the writer is consistently scien- 
tific, his terms have only an intellectual value, put 
only the mind into play, and guide all minds 
through the same routine of syllogism and inference 
to an inevitable conclusion. In contrast with this 
uniformity in the appeal of science is the infinite 
variableness and adaptability of literature. Every 
piece of literature is a mimic piece of life that 
tempts the reader to capture from it, with mind 
and heart and imagination, an individual bliss; he 
may, in some measure, shape it as he will — work 
out his own destiny with it. A theorem from 
Euclid once mastered is one and the same thing to 
every man — perennially monotonous. A play of 
Shakespeare's (or, for that matter, a sonnet of Kos- 
setti's) speaks a language that varies in its power 
and suggestion according to the personality of the 
hearer, and even according to his mood; the poem 
gets its value, as life gets its value, from the 
temperament that confronts it; and it is this en- 
chanting fickleness in literature that of late years 
impressionism has been more and more noting and 
illustrating, until some critics, like M. Anatole 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 211 

France, assure us that literary criticism is nothing, 
and should be nothing, but the recital of one's per- 
sonal adventures with a book. 

It is a mistake, then, to protest against the 
growth of impressionism, as some nervous guar- 
dians of the public literary conscience are inclined 
to protest, as if a parasitic form of literature were 
creeping into undue importance. Eegarded as lit- 
erature about literature, impressionism may seem 
an overrefined product — two degrees removed from 
actual life, fantastically unreal; but regarded as the 
intimate record of what a few happy moments have 
meant to an alert mind and heart, impressionism is 
transcendently close to fact. The popularity of 
impressionism is only one sign more that we are 
learning to prize, above most things else, richness 
of spiritual experience. The sincere and signifi- 
cant mood — this is what we have come to care for, 
whether the mood be suggested by life, by nature, 
or by art and literature. False moods expressed 
maladroitly will doubtless try to get themselves 
accepted, just as artificial poems about nature have 
multiplied endlessly since Wordsworth's day. The 
counterfeit merely proves the worth of the original. 
In an age that has learned to look on art with 
conscious sincerity, and to recognize that the expe- 
rience offered in art rivals religious experience in 
renovating and stimulating power, there must more 
and more come to be an imaginative literature that 
takes its inspiration direct from art 5 of such 



212 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

imaginative literature critical impressionistic writ- 
ing is one of the most vital forms. 

But though, impressionistic writing may, as 
literature, not only justify itself, but prove to be 
sincerely expressive of some of the most original 
tendencies of the modern mind, the case is some- 
what different when such writing is considered as 
literary criticism pure and simple, and is cross- 
questioned as to whether or no it can do the 
work that has hitherto been exacted of literary 
criticism. Some French critic, perhaps M. Jules 
Lemaitre, has been accused of turning an essay on 
a volume of Eenan's Histoire des origines du chris- 
tianisme into a lyrical recital of his own boyish 
delights with a Noah's ark. Instances enough of 
such critical waywardness must have fallen under 
every one's eye who keeps the run of current essay- 
work. Sainte-Beuve long ago said of Taine that 
in criticising an author he was apt to pull all the 
blankets to his own side of the bed. And what 
was true of Taine, because of his devotion to 
theory, is true of many modern critics, because of 
their wilfulness and caprice — or, to put the mat- 
ter more sympathetically, because of their over- 
ruling delight in their own sensibility and im- 
pressionableness ; they care for themselves more 
jthan for their author. When such egoism goes 
with genius and with artistic resource, the resulting 
essays justify themselves, because they reveal in 
fascinating wise new phases of the ever-varying 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 213 

spiritual consciousness of the age. But even in 
such cases, where a really original personality, 
under the chance stimulus of literature, flashes out 
at us winning and imaginatively suggestive glimpses 
of itself, it may be doubted whether the essay that 
results is, properly speaking, criticism. Nor is this 
doubt a mere quibble over terms. The doubt in- 
volves several serious questions as regards the 
nature of a work of art and the critic's proper mode 
of approach to art. Paradoxical folk have some- 
times asserted that what is best worth while in a 
work of art is what the author never meant to put 
in it, and that the superlative act of the critic is to 
find in a work of art for the delight of modern tem- 
peraments some previously unsuspected implication 
of beauty. Paradoxes aside, how much truth is 
there in this conception of the critic's task ? and 
how much truth in the conception that goes with 
it of the essentially relative and variable character 
of art ? We may grant that a piece of writing is 
literature, providing it is a beautiful and significant 
revelation of personality, whether the nerve-vibra- 
tions that it utters take their start from life or 
nature or art. But is such a piece of writing 
criticism if in commenting on a work of art it 
wilfully neglects its intended value as conceived in 
the mind of the original artist and as expressing, at 
least in part, the genius of the age whose life he 
shared ? Can criticism properly neglect this origi- 
nal pleasure-value in a work of art ? Can it 



214 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

furthermore neglect that permanent and deeply 
enwrought pleasure, involved in a work of art, 
through which it has always ministered and will 
always minister to normal human nature? Can 
criticism properly confine itself to the record of a 
momentary shiver across a single set of possibly 
degenerate nerves ? 

Surely, there is something objective in a work of 
art even when the work of art is regarded simply 
and solely as potential pleasure ; and surely it is 
part of the task of the critic to take this objective 
character into full consideration. Unless he does 
so, his appreciation of the work will not be 
properly critical ; nor indeed, for that matter, will 
his appreciation gather the full measure of per- 
sonal delight that the work of art offers him. Just 
here lies the distinction between whimsical impres- 
sionism — which may be literature, very delightful 
literature, but lacks the perspective essential to 
criticism — and vital appreciation, which is indeed 
criticism in its purest and most suggestive form. 

A work of art is a permanent incarnation of 
spiritual energy waiting for release. Milton long 
ago called a good book " the precious life-blood of a 
master-spirit stored up on purpose to a life beyond 
life." We nowadays may go even farther than 
this, and find treasured up in a piece of literature 
certain definite blisses and woes and flashes of 
insight that once went thrilling through a special 
temperament and mind. The most recent psycho- 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 215 

logical explanations of artistic creation^ concern 
themselves continually with the feelings of the 
artist ; they trace out minutely the ways in which 
through the play of the artist's feelings a work 
of art is instinctively and surely generated. The 
poet concentrates his thought on some concrete 
piece of life, on some incident, character, or bit of 
personal experience ; because of his emotional tem- 
perament, this concentration of interest stirs in him 
a quick play of feeling and prompts the swift con- 
currence of many images. Under the incitement 
of these feelings, and in accordance with laws of 
association that may at least in part be described, 
these images grow bright and clear, take definite 
shapes, fall into significant groupings, branch and 
ramify, and break into sparkling mimicry of the 
actual world of the senses — all the time delicately 
controlled by the poet's conscious purpose and so 
growing intellectually significant, but all the time, 
if the work of art is to be vital, impelled also in 
their alert weaving of patterns by the moods o£ the 
poet, by his fine instinctive sense of the emotional 
expressiveness of this or that image that lurks in 
the background of his consciousness. For this 
intricate web of images, tinged with his most 
intimate moods, the poet through his intuitive 
command of words finds an apt series of sound- 
symbols and records them with written characters. 

1 See, for example, Professor Dilthey's Die EinUldungs- 
kraft des Dichters. 



216 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

And so a poem arises through, an exquisite distilla- 
tion of personal moods into imagery and into lan- 
guage, and is ready to offer to all future genera- 
tions its undiminishing store of spiritual joy and 
strength. 

But it is not merely the poet's own spiritual 
energy that goes into his poem. The spirit of the 
age — if the poem include much of life in its scope, 
if it be more than a lyric — enters also into the 
poem, and moulds it and shapes it, and gives it in 
part its colour and emotional cast and intellectual 
quality. In every artist there is a definite mental 
bias, a definite spiritual organization and play of 
instincts, which results in large measure from the 
common life of his day and generation, and which 
represents this life — makes it potent — within the 
individuality of the artist. This so-called " acquired 
constitution of the life of the soul " — it has been 
described by Professor Dilthey with noteworthy 
acuteness and thoroughness — determines in some 
measure the contents of the artist's mind, for it 
determines his interests, and therefore the sensa- 
tions and perceptions that he captures and auto- 
matically stores up. It guides him in his 
judgments of worth, in his instinctive likes and 
dislikes as regards conduct and character, and con- 
trols in large measure the play of his imagination 
as he shapes the action of his drama or epic and 
the destinies of his heroes. Its prejudices inter- 
filtrate throughout the molecules of his entire 



IMPKESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 217 

moral and mental life, and give to each image and 
idea some slight shade of attractiveness or repul- 
siveness, so that when the artist's spirit is at work 
under the stress of feeling, weaving into the fabric 
of a poem the competing images and ideas in his 
consciousness, certain ideas and images come more 
readily and others lag behind, and the resulting 
work of art gets a colour and an emotional tone 
and suggestions of value that subtly reflect the 
genius of the age. Thus it is that into a work of art 
there creeps a prevailing sort of spiritual energy 
that may be identified as also operating throughout 
the social life of the time, and as finding its further 
expressions in the precepts and the parables of the 
moralist, in the statecraft of the political leader, 
in the visionary dreams of the prophet and priest, 
and, in short, in all the various ideals, mental, 
moral, and social, that rule the age. 

Now, as for the impressionistic writer about 
literature — he is apt to concern himself very little 
with this historical origin of a work of art. In 
dealing with the poetry of a long past age, he 
will very likely refuse the hard task of " trundling 
back his soul" two hundred or two thousand years 
and putting himself in close sympathy with the 
people of an earlier period. He is apt to take a 
poem very much as he would take a bit of nature 
— as a pretty play of sound or imagery upon the 
senses ; and he may, indeed, capture through this 
half-sensuous treatment of art, a peculiar, though 



218 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

wayward, delight. But the appreciative critic is 
not content with this. He is, to be sure, well aware 
that his final enjoyment of a poem of some earlier 
age will be a far subtler and richer experience than 
would be the mere repetition of the pleasures that 
the poem gave its writer; that his enjoyment will 
have countless overtones and undertones that could 
not have existed for the producer of the poem or for 
its original hearers. But he also believes that the 
generating pleasures that produced the work of 
art, and that once thrilled in a single human spirit, 
in response to the play and counter-play upon him 
of the life of his time, must remain permanently 
the central core of energy in the work of art ; and 
that only as he comes to know those pleasures with 
fine intimacy, can he conjure out of the work of 
art its perfect acclaim of delight for now and here. 
Therefore the appreciative critic makes use of 
the historical method in his study of literature. 
He does not use this method as the man of science 
uses it, for the final purpose of understanding and 
explaining literature as a mass of sociological facts 
governed by fixed laws. This rationalization of 
literature is not his chief concern, though he may 
pass this way on his journey to his special goal. 
But he is persuaded that in all the art and all the 
literature that reach the present out of the past, 
spirit speaks to spirit across a vast gulf of time ; 
that he can catch the precise quality of one of these 
voices that come down the years only through the 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 219 

aid of delicate imaginative sympathy with the life 
of an elder generation ; and that he can develop to 
certainty of response this divining sympathy only 
through patient and loyal study of the peculiar 
play of the powers that built up in the minds and 
the imaginations of those earlier men their special 
vision of earth and heaven. 

DiflBcult and elusive indeed are the questions he 
must ask himself about the art from a distant age, 
if he is to be sure of just the quality of the pleas- 
ure that went into its creation. If it be Greek 
art that he seeks to appreciate, he will study and 
interpret it as the expression of the spirit of Greek 
life, of a spirit that lived along the nerves and 
fibres of an entire social organism, of a spirit that 
sprung from the unconscious depths of instinct,, out 
of which slowly bodied themselves forth conscious 
purposes and clear ideals, and that penetrated and 
animated all fashions and forms of belief and be- 
haviour, and gave them their colour and shape and 
rhythm. He will trace out and capture the quality 
of this spirit as it expressed itself in the physical 
life of the Greeks, in their social customs, in their 
weaving of scientific systems, in their worship of 
nature, and in the splendid intricacies of their re- 
ligious ritual and mysteries. And so he will hope 
to gain at last a sure sense of the peculiar play of 
energy that found release in some one of their 
poems, or in the marble or bronze of a hero or a 
god. 



220 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

But the universal element in the poetry of an 
age by no means completes the objective character 
of the feeling the poetry has treasured for the 
delight of later times. In the case of all poetry 
not communal in its origin, the pleasure involved 
in a poem was generated in the consciousness of a 
single artist, and had a definite quality that partook 
of his individuality. Therefore the appreciative 
critic has a further nice series of identifications 
before him in his ideal search for the delight that 
inheres in a poem. Just what was the innermost 
nature of the poet who appeals to us in it, often 
so pathetically, down through the perilous ways 
of time ? What was the special vision of life 
that he saw and felt the thrill of? What were 
the actual rhythms of the quicksilver passion 
in his veins ? What was the honeydew on which 
he fed? What was the quintessential pleasure 
that he, among all men of his day, distilled into 
his verse ? 

Fantastic or insoluble these questions may seem 
unless with regard to poets about whom we have 
the closest personal memoranda. Yet critics have 
now and then answered such questions with sur- 
prising insight, even in the case of poets the 
gossip of whose lives is wholly unknown to us, and 
whose form of art was least personal in its reve- 
lations. Professor Dowden's grouping of Shake- 
speare's plays in accordance with the prevailing 
spiritual tone-colour of each and the moods toward 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 221 

life that are imaginatively uttered — moods of 
debonair light-heartedness, of rollicking jollity, 
of despairing pessimism, or of luminous golden- 
tempered comprehension — is an admirable example 
of the possible intimate interpretation of a poet's 
varying emotions as treasured in his art. 

Here, then, are suggested two ways in which the 
appreciative critic who would make his impression 
of a work of art something more than a superficial 
momentary irritation of pleasure and pain will 
contrive to direct the play of his spiritual energy. 
He will realize, as far as he can, the primal vital 
impulse that wrought out the work of art ; he will, 
in appreciating a poem, discover and recreate in 
his own soul the rhythms of delight with which 
the poem vibrated for the men of the age whose 
life the poem uttered ; and he will also discern and 
realize those actual moods, those swift counter- 
changes of feeling, which once, in a definite place 
and at a definite moment, within the consciousness 
of a single artist evoked images and guided them 
into union, charged them with spiritual power, and 
called into rhythmical order sound-symbols to 
represent them thenceforth for ever. 

But it must at once be noted that this mimetic 
enjoyment is after all only the beginning of that 
process of vitalization by which an appreciative 
critic wins from a work of art its entire store of 
delight. The mood of the modern critic is some- 
thing far subtler than any mere repetition of the 



222 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

mood of the original creative artist ; it contains in 
itself a complexity and a richness of suggestion and 
motifs that correspond to all the gains the human 
spirit has made since the earlier age. Indeed, these 
subtle spiritual differences begin to declare them- 
selves the moment the critic tries to describe the 
earlier enjoyment enshrined in a work of art. 
Walter Pater, for example, in noting in his essay 
on Winckelmann, the serene equipoise in Greek 
art between man's spirit and his body, at once 
involuntarily sets over against this mood the later 
mood in which spirit usurps and so tyrannizes over 
matter in its exaction of expression as to distort 
the forms of art, and render them " pathetic." No 
such contrast as this was present in the mind of 
the Greek as he enjoyed his own art; nor any 
contrast with a hungry, over-subtle intellectualism, 
such as nowadays makes the modern consciousness 
anxious for the individualizing accurate detail and 
the motley effects of realism. Yet these contrasts 
and others like them are part of the very essence of 
our modern delight in the freedom and largeness 
and calm strength of Greek art. Perhaps the 
Greek had more zest in his art than we have in 
it ; but his enjoyment certainly had not the luxuri- 
ous intricacy and the manifold implications of our 
enjoyment. 

Always, then, in the complete appreciation of a 
work of art there is this superim position of other 
moods upon the mood of the creative artist — 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 223 

there is a reinforcement of the original effect by 
the delicate interfusion of new tones and strains 
of feeling. Often this is as if harmonies once 
written for a harpsichord were played upon a 
modern piano whose " temperament " has been 
made rich and expressive through the artful use and 
adjustment of all possible overtones. We shall be 
able to draw from the music new shades of mean- 
ing and of beauty. But the original chords — those 
we should scrupulously repeat; and the original 
tone-colour, too, it were well to have at least in 
memory. If a critic will win from early Floren- 
tine painting — from the work, for example, of 
Fra Lippo Lippi — its innermost value for the 
modern temperament, he will first recover imagi- 
natively the sincere religious impulse and the 
naive religious faith, as well as the dawning delight 
in the opening possibilities of a new art, which ani- 
mated those early painters. He will try to catch 
the very mood that underlies the tender mystic 
wistfulness of Lippo Lippi's Madonnas, and that 
gives them their soft and luminous constraint in 
the midst of the eager adoration of shepherd boys 
and attending angels. He will recognize this mood 
as perhaps all the more appealing because of the 
quaint incompleteness of the artist's technique, 
his loyal archaic awkwardness, his religious formal- 
ism and symbolism, his unsure perspective, all the 
tantalizing difficulties of execution through which 
his vision of beauty made its way into colour and 



224 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

form. This mood will define itself for the critic 
through the aid of many nicely modulated contrasts 

— through contrast, it may be, with the more 
shadowed and poignantly mysterious Madonnas of 
Botticelli, and with the splendid and victorious 
womanhood of Titian's Madonnas, with the gentle 
and terrestrial grace of motherhood in those of 
Andrea del Sarto, and with the sweetly ordered 
comeliness of Van Dyck's Madonnas. But above 
all, it will define itself through contrast with our 
modern mood toward the Madonna and the re- 
ligious ideas she symbolizes — through contrast 
with our sophisticated reverie, our hardly won half- 
credence, and our wise, pathetic insight. And 
through this contrast the earlier mood will gain for 
us a certain poignancy of delight; for the mood 
will come to us as something restored as by miracle 
out of the otherwise irrecoverable past of the spirit 

— out of the past of that spirit whose wayfaring 
through passions of aspiration and joy, and through 
drear times of sadness and desolation, was our 
wayfaring, since we have gathered into ourselves 
all the usufruct of it : — 

*' Oh ! what is this that knows the road I came, 
The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame, 
The lifted, shifted steeps and all the way ?" 

The appreciative critic, then, should know the 
characteristic joy of every generation of men, and 
the special joy of each individual artist. He is to 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 225 

be a specialist in historic delight, as the poet is 
a specialist in the joys of his own day and genera- 
tion. And therefore in trying to make real to 
the men of his own time the special bliss that 
an older work of art contains for them, the 
appreciative critic will not be content, as is the 
impressionistic critic, with interpreting it in terms 
of some chance wayward mood. He will wish to 
relumine and make potent all that is emotionally 
vital in the work of art ; he will capture again its 
original quality ; he will revive imaginatively those 
moments of bliss in the history of the human spirit 
which are closely akin to this bliss and which yet 
vary from it finely, and moments, too, that con- 
trast broadly and picturesquely with it, all the 
moments, indeed, which his divining instinct directs 
him toward, as fit to throw into relief by contrast 
what is quintessential in this one moment of spirit- 
ual ardour. Thus he will try to offer to the men of 
his own day a just appreciation of the peculiar joy 
that, in the passage of years, the human spirit has 
stored up for itself in this record of one of its 
earlier phases of experience. 

Throughout all his patient search for the precise 
quality of a work of art, the critic will, of course, 
make wise use of the science of aesthetics. Its 
analyses and principles are supposed to reveal and 
sum up in terse formulas the mystery of beauty, 
and they should therefore offer the critic a means 
of steadying himself into a sincerely sympathetic 

Q 



226 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

and uneccentric report of the special charm that 
lurks in a work of art. Yet it must at once be 
noted that for the appreciative critic the whole 
region of aesthetics is full of danger. Esthetic 
theorizing has been the pet pastime of many callous 
and horny-eyed philosophers, whose only knowledge 
of beauty has come by hearsay. Nothing worse can 
happen to a critic than to be caught in the meshes of 
such thinkers' a priori theories, so much depends 
on the critic's keeping an intimately vital relation 
to the art of which he will interpret the peculiar 
power. Of recent years, however, the science of 
sesthetics has been rescued from the region of 
metaphysics, and has been brought very close to 
fact and made very real and suggestive through 
the use of psychological methods of study. The 
peculiar genius of the artist has been analyzed and 
described; the characteristics of his temperament 
have been noted with the nicest loyalty ; and par- 
ticularly the play of his special faculty, the imagi- 
nation, as this faculty through the use of sensations 
and images and moods and ideas creates a work of 
art, has been followed out with the utmost delicacy 
of observation by such acute and sensitive analysts 
as M. Gabriel Seailles, M. Michaut, and Professor 
Dilthey. The behaviour, too, of the mind that is 
enjoying a work of art — this has been minutely 
studied and described ; the " effects " and the " im- 
pressions " have been recorded by such masters of 
silvery instruments for weighing a fancy and meas- 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 227 

uring a motive as Fecliner. The relations between 
all these impressions and effects and the form and 
content of a work of art have been tabulated. And 
so the science of aesthetics has become a really 
vital record of what may be called the mind's nor- 
mal behaviour both in the creation and in the 
enjoyment of art. 

The expert critic must some time or other have 
followed out all these devious analyses and tracked 
out the intricate workings both of the typical 
artist's and of the typical appreciator's mind. Such 
an abstract initiation will have quickened his powers 
of perception in numberless ways, will have made 
him alive to countless signs and suggestions in a 
work of art that might otherwise have appealed to 
him in vain, and above all will serve to steady him 
against extravagance and grotesque caprice in ap- 
preciation. In these analyses and principles he 
has the sensitive record of a consensus of expert 
opinion on the nature of artistic enjoyment — its 
causes and varieties. Through the help of these 
canons he may guard against meaningless egoism ; 
he may manoeuvre wisely within the region of the 
normal ; he may keep within measurable distance of 
the tastes and the temperaments of his fellows. 
He will be able to test his impressions, to judge of 
their relative importance, to restrain personal whim 
within bounds, and to remain sanely true to the pre- 
dominating interests of the normal human mind. 

Not that the critic will let his use of aesthetic 



228 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

formulas and points of view conventionalize or 
stereotype his treatment of art. If he be happily 
individual and alert, he will refuse to have forced 
upon him a system, a method, unalterable precon- 
ceptions, or habitual modes of approach to art. He 
will keep in his repeated encounters with a work 
of art much of the dilettante's bright wilfulness 
and fickleness. He will go to it in all moods and 
all weathers, will wait upon its good pleasure, and 
will note delightedly all its fleeting aspects. But 
these stray impressions will not content him, nor 
will he care to report them as of themselves form- 
ing a valid and final appreciation. He will play 
the pedant with himself; he will, in sober moments 
of wise hypocrisy, test the worth of his impres- 
sions by approved and academic standards ; and he 
will scrutinize them in the light of those canons 
which the best modern theorizers in things aesthetic 
have worked out psychologically. He will select 
and arrange and make significant and unify. And 
so, while approaching a work of art unconvention- 
ally and communing with it intimately, he will, in 
commenting on it, keep his casual and personal 
sense of its charm within limits, and be intent on 
doing full justice to what the work of art may well 
mean to the normal man in normal moods. 

Moreover, this aesthetic initiation will reveal to 
the critic one special sort of pleasure stored in a 
work of art that the layman is peculiarly apt to 
miss — the pleasure that may be won from tracing 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 229 

out the artist's mastery of teclinique and the secrets 
of his victorious execution. Here, again, the critic, 
if he is to make the work of art give up its quint- 
essential qualitj'-, must call the historical method to 
his aid. An artist who, at any moment in the 
history of art, wishes to express his vision of 
beauty through the medium and the technique of 
his special art, whether it be painting, or music, or 
poetry, always confronts a definite set of limiting 
conditions. He finds certain fashions prevailing 
in his art; he finds in vogue certain conventional 
ways of treating material; he finds certain fixed 
forms offering themselves for his use — forms like 
the sonata and the concerto in music, or like the 
sonnet and the drama in poetry. These forms are 
traditional, have various laws and regulations 
attached to their handling, and in a sense limit 
the freedom of the artist, require him to make cer- 
tain concessions, force him to conceive his material 
in stereotyped ways, and to cast it in predetermined 
moulds. An artist has always to find out for him- 
self how far he can use these old forms ; how far 
he can limit himself advantageously through 
accepting old conventions, whether his peculiar 
vision of beauty can be fully realized within the 
limits of the established technique, or whether he 
must be an innovator. 

There is a curious and exquisite pleasure to be 
won from watching artists at close quarters with 
technical problems of this sort, and from observ- 



230 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

ing the fine certainty with which genius gets the 
better of technical difficulties, through accepting 
a convention here, through following a fashion 
there, through slightly or even audaciously alter- 
ing received forms or modes to secure scope for 
novel moods or hitherto unattained effects. An 
artist's vital relation to the past of his art — this 
is something that as it shows itself here and there 
in his work, the sensitive and alert critic finds 
keen pleasure in detecting. Here, again, the 
critic's specialized temperament and knowledge 
mediate between the art of earlier times and the 
men of his own day, and reveal through the help 
of aesthetics and history the peculiar pleasure with 
which art has, consciously or unconsciously, been 
charged. 

Finally, the critic must bear in mind that it is 
distinctly for the men of his own day that he is 
revitalizing art ; that it is for them that his 
specialized temperament is to use its resources. 
Every age, some one has said, must write its own 
literary criticism; and this holds specially true 
of appreciative criticism. The value of a work 
of art depends on what it finds in the conscious- 
ness to which it appeals ; and because individuality 
is deeper and richer now than it has ever been 
before, and because the men of to-day are "the 
heirs of the ages," and have "ransacked the ages 
and spoiled the climes," a great traditional work 
of art ought to have a richer, more various, more 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 231 

poignant value for modern men than it had for 
their predecessors. Even in the matter of sense- 
perceptions this progress is noticeable. " Our fore- 
fathers," says a recent essayist on M. Claude Monet, 
" saw fewer tones and colours than we ; they had, in 
fact, a simpler and more naive vision ; the modern 
eye is being educated to distinguish a complexity 
of shades and varieties of colour before unknown." 
If there has been this increase of delicate power 
even in a slowly changing physical organ, far 
greater have been the increase and diversification 
of sensitiveness in the region of spiritual percep- 
tion. New facts and ideas have been pouring into 
the national consciousness from the physical sci- 
ences during the last half -century, tending to trans- 
form in countless subtle ways man's sense of his 
own place in the universe, his ideals of brotherhood, 
of justice, of happiness, and his orientation toward 
the Unseen. The half-mystical control that has of 
late years been won over physical forces, the in- 
creased speed with which news flies from country 
to country, the cheap and swift modes of travel 
from land to land which break down the barriers 
between the most widely divergent civilizations — 
all these influences are reacting continually on the 
life of the spirit, are stirring men's minds to new 
thoughts and new moods, and developing in them 
new aptitudes and new powers. For minds thus 
changed and thus touched into new alertness and 
sensitiveness, past art must take on new phases, 



232 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

reveal in itself new suggestions, and acquire or 
lose stimulating power in manifold ways. These 
alterations of value the appreciative critic ought 
to feel and transcribe. 

And therefore the critic's must not be a " clois- 
tered virtue " ; at least imaginatively, he must be 
in sympathy with the whole life of his time. 
He must be intimately aware of its practical 
aims and preoccupations, of its material striv- 
ings, of all the busy play of its social activities, 
of its moral and religious perturbations, even of its 
political intrigues. Doubtless Matthew Arnold 
was right when he insisted on "detachment" as 
the first requisite of good criticism. But in urg- 
ing detachment, Arnold meant simply that the 
critic must not let himself become the victim of 
practical problems or party organizations ; that he 
must not let his imagination be seized upon by a 
set of definite ideas that are at once to be realized 
in fact ; that he must not become an intellectual or 
moral or political bigot or a mere Tory or Eadical 
advocate — the one-idea'd champion of a pro- 
gramme. The critic must have much of the dilet- 
tante's fine irresponsibility, perhaps even something 
of the cynic's amused aloofness from the keen com- 
petitions of daily life. But he must also have the 
dilettante's infinite variety, his intense dramatic 
curiosity, and his alert, wide-ranging vision. He 
should know the men of his own day through and 
through in all their tastes and tempers, and should 



IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 233 

be even more sensitively aware than they are them- 
selves of their collective prejudices. So he should 
deepen his personality and as far as possible include 
within it whatever is most characteristic of his age. 
In the terms of all this, as well as of his own fleet- 
ing moods, he will try to appreciate past art. And 
so he will become, in very truth, the specialized 
temperament of the moment, interpreting the past 
to the present. 

Continually, then, in his search for the pleasure 
involved in a work of art, the critic finds that he 
must go outside the work of art and go beyond his 
own momentary state of consciousness; he must 
see the work of art in its relations to larger and 
larger groups of facts ; and he can charm out of it 
its true quality only by interpreting its sensations 
and images and rhythms as expressing something 
far greater than themselves, and as appealing to 
something far more permanent than his own fleet- 
ing moods. He must put the work of art in its 
historical setting ; he must realize it in its psycho- 
logical origin ; he must conceive of it as one char- 
acteristic moment in the development of the 
human spirit, and in order thus to vitalize it he 
must be aware of it in its contrasting relations 
with other characteristic moments and phases of 
this development ; and, finally, he must be alive to 
its worth as a delicately transparent illustration of 
sesthetic law. In regarding the work of art under 
all these aspects, his aim is primarily not to 



234 IMPEESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 

explain and not to judge or dogmatize, but to enjoy; 
to realize the manifold charm the work of art has 
gathered into itself from all sources, and to inter- 
pret this charm imaginatively to the men of his 
own day and generation. 



THREE STUDIES IN 
LITERATURE. 



BY 



LEWIS EDWARDS GATES, 

Assistant Professor of English in Harvard University, 
Cloth. i2mo. $1.50. 



FRANCIS JEFFREY. ASPECTS OF THE 

CARDINAL NEWMAN. ROMANTIC PERIOD OF 

MATTHEW ARNOLD. ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



"Professor Gates is fortunate in his subjects; his 
subjects are fortunate in his justly discriminating 
appreciation. The reader is fortunate in his illumi- 
nating treatment of these notable characters, often 
misunderstood and disparaged, — the brilliant re- 
viewer, the spiritual rhetorician, the humanistic critic. 
These masterly Studies should be in the hands of 
all students of our literature in this century." 

— Outlook, 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 



NATIONAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS 

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY, Editor 



OLD CAMBRIDGE 

By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 
i2mo. Cloth. $1.25 

Chicago Evening Post. 

" No better possible choice than Col. Higginson could have been 
made for the recording and perpetuation of the literary glories of the 
old college town. To the accurate knowledge of the pleasant Massa- 
chusetts city, obtainable only by a long lifetime spent within its bor- 
ders, Col Higginson adds a close intimacy with the chief characters 
in the part played by the place in the formation of American letters. 
. . . The volume is only too short for such matter as the writer has 
tried to put into it, and were the matter of another sort, the charm 
of manner would still leave too little of the contents." 



BROOK FARM 

By LINDSAY SWIFT 
i2mo. Cloth. $1.25 



The Boston Courier. 

" The book has a value apart from its delineation of Brook Farm. 
. . . It ought to be widely and carefully read, especially where . . . 
socialistic notions are gaining many adherents, for it will aid the 
young enthusiast to define what may be and what cannot be for a 
very long century at least." 



IN PREPARATION 
THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVEL 

By Paul Leicester Ford. 

THE KNICKERBOCKERS 

By The Rev. Henry Van Dyke, D.D. 

SOUTHERN HUMORISTS 

By John Kendrick Bangs. 

THE CLERGY IN AHERICAN LIFE AND 

LETTERS. By The Rev. Daniel Dulaney Addison. 

FLOWER OF ESSEX 

By the Editor. 

THE HOOSIER WRITERS 

By Meredith Nicholson. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 












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